What is AWS Trusted Advisor and How Can It Help Me?
May 23, 2023
The cloud computing sector is experiencing tremendous growth, more than a decade after platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP launched. Organizations all over the world now have access to tremendous on-demand computing power and storage without having to manage on-premises infrastructure. What’s more, the leading cloud vendors today offer a wide range of solutions and managed services that increase accessibility to powerful next-gen technologies, like AI/ML and serverless computing.
However, many organizations still aren’t unlocking the full potential of being on the cloud. Engineering teams are running unoptimized environments, overpaying for resources, and leaving IT infrastructure exposed to different types of risk, which is unnecessary, especially given the tools available today. One such that anyone on AWS should be familiar with is AWS Trusted Advisor.
This service provides tailored recommendations on how to improve outcomes on the AWS cloud. It helps IT teams follow current AWS best practices to optimize infrastructure, boost security, lower costs, monitor usage, and much more. And it’s how leaders can create even more value on AWS.
Read on to learn more about how AWS Trusted Advisor works and the benefits of using it for your AWS environments.
How Does AWS Trusted Advisor Work?
AWS Trusted Advisor acts like a third-party consultant with incredible AWS knowledge. The tool scans AWS infrastructure and compares it against best practices across the following five categories:
- Cost optimization
- Performance
- Security
- Fault tolerance
- Service quotas
It then makes tailored recommendations on ways to improve across each of these areas to achieve peak results on the cloud. It’s up to companies to then follow the suggestions.
Cost Optimization
On the cloud cost optimization front, AWS Trusted Advisor evaluates how organizations are using their environments, as well as how those environments are configured. The tool can dig into things like RDS DB instances and EBS volumes to identify idle or underutilized resources. It can also look at Lambda function executions and see where there are extended timeouts, indicating a lack of usage. Metrics like these highlight to engineers where they can cut back on resources they currently have provisioned or where they may be able to switch to more cost-effective configurations.
Performance
With respect to performance, AWS Trusted Advisor will conduct similar evaluations and make recommendations on how to maximize metrics like throughput or minimize latency. Many teams use it to discover wasted Amazon EC2 instances or inappropriate Amazon CloudFront settings for specific use cases.
Security
AWS Trusted Advisor helps with security by encouraging users to implement foundational cloud security best practices. These include maintaining appropriate Amazon S3 bucket permissions, limiting Amazon RDS security group access risk, and limiting access key exposure. At a time when cybersecurity threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated, AWS Trusted Advisor is a valuable tool for ensuring table-stakes cloud security capabilities.
Fault tolerance
When it comes to fault tolerance, AWS Trusted Advisor aims to improve reliability by checking on infrastructure related to backups and availability. The tool can assess auto-scaling groups and identify where engineering teams have disabled AWS Availability Zones or RDS backups that would otherwise kick in when applications go down.
Service quotas
The last pillar AWS Trusted Advisor evaluates is the service quotas pillar. Service quotes refer to the maximum number of resources that engineering teams can create within a single AWS account. Quotas are important for making sure that all AWS users have access to what they need, while also protecting companies from spending far beyond their limits. In fact, AWS Trusted Advisor notifies teams when they exceed 80% usage of a service quota.
Get Started with AWS Trusted Advisor Today
Organizations can dramatically improve their cloud outcomes by following AWS Trusted Advisor’s recommendations across these five pillars. AWS Trusted Advisor provides visibility into day-to-day performance, which is particularly useful for companies that have been on the cloud for a while but have lost sight of what metrics to track. The tool gets leaders back on track and in line with today’s best practices.
For those who need help optimizing AWS environments or implementing recommendations from AWS Trusted Advisor, ClearScale can help. As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, we’ve worked with enterprises in a wide range of industries to finetune their cloud deployments. We can help you make the changes suggested by AWS Trusted Advisor and ensure that any updates you make are for the long-term benefit of your organization and customers.
To give an example, we worked recently with a client in the digital commerce space to modernize and optimize their cloud environment. We identified opportunities to improve the company’s infrastructure and set the team up to take advantage of big data, auto-scaling, and more. Since concluding the project, our client has seen a 25% reduction in cloud spend.
Ready to take your AWS environment to the next level? Watch the webinar Cloud Cost Optimization: Strategies and Best Practices for Maximizing Savings.
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