Infrastructure Optimization with AWS TrustedAdvisor

Leveraging the full advantages and functionality of cloud requires continuous work to optimize your resources, improve your infrastructure and detect potential issues with a strong understanding of the current state. This brings an important need for businesses to monitor, control and optimize their infrastructures and improve their cloud infrastructure. Although it may seem like an exhausting task to achieve at first, the cloud provides necessary services and capabilities for businesses to identify areas of improvement and implement control mechanisms automatically. AWS Trusted Advisor serves as an integral part of cloud management and infrastructure optimization to achieve success in your cloud operations.

The service covers 4 key areas of Cost Optimization, Performance, Security and Fault Tolerance to continuously scan and improve your AWS infrastructure. Each category includes a list of checks against AWS best practices for the service configuration and usage patterns to help you optimize your AWS environment as you scale. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how AWS Trusted Advisor guides businesses to optimize their infrastructure. Let’s start with a high-level overview of the service, how it adds value to distinct areas of your business and continue with the key service features based on your AWS support plan.

An Overview of AWS Trusted Advisor

The main goal of AWS Trusted Advisor is to provide you recommendations on Cost Optimization, Performance, Security and Fault Tolerance. These recommendations are based on the AWS best practices to help you reduce your costs, improve your application and workload performance, strengthen your security posture and improve reliability of your operations through high availability.

The service simply works as follows: once you set up the service, AWS Trusted Advisor starts to scan your AWS environment in line with these 4 categories. The service basically compares the current state and configuration of your resources against best practices and provides associated recommendations to improve each category.

Diagram Source: AWS¹

4 Key Categories within AWS Trusted Advisor

Cost Optimization

The service helps you identify and implement ways to reduce your cloud spending and optimize your resources by indicating potential cost savings. The associated checks include optimizing your instance and service usages with recommended saving plans for your usage patterns and eliminating idle or underutilized resources.

Performance

AWS Trusted Advisor helps to improve your application performance through a list of checks covering service limits, utilization monitoring and throughput optimization. For instance, the service limit check informs you when the service usage exceeds 80% of service limits to maintain your application’s performance.

Security

You can analyze and inspect the security of your resource configurations with AWS Trusted Advisor and detect any potential vulnerabilities at scale. Security category covers a large number of security points including security groups, snapshot security, password policies, IAM utilization and so on.

Fault Tolerance

The best practices within this category help you to ensure high availability and reliability of your resources. AWS Trusted Advisor provides necessary recommendations to achieve a fault-tolerant infrastructure against any operational incident or issue across your resources. The key checks include multi Availability Zone, autoscaling mechanisms, automated backups, health checks and redundancy controls to ensure continuous operations.

Amazon Trusted Advisor provides 50+ checks across 4 key categories to help you achieve cost efficiency, high performance, security and reliability in your AWS infrastructure. You can check the full set of checks in AWS Trusted Advisor here:

AWS Trusted Advisor Service Features and Advantages

First of the many features, AWS Trusted Advisor is highly integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management. Based on your security controls and compliance requirements, you can select different levels for access including full or read-only access and restrictions for certain categories within AWS Trusted Advisor or specific checks and actions.

The service enables you to get notified based on the recommended actions with the opt-in notification feature. These notifications include the weekly reports of your infrastructure status based on the service checks and recommendations. You can also customize these reports by excluding certain resources if you don’t want to see them appearing in these reports for easier management, for example the selected resources for testing or learning objectives that don’t need to be inspected. However, you can always go back and include these resources in the reports when you need.

Other fully available features of the service includes refresh options and action links for associated recommendations for easier management and convenience. All these features included in the freely available service plan and the premium features provided for Business and Enterprise Support Levels -described below- help businesses to continuously optimize their infrastructure against AWS best practices and enhance their operations with recommended improvements on their AWS infrastructure.

Support Plans for AWS Trusted Advisor

Although some core checks of AWS Trusted Advisor are freely available for everyone, the full list of checks and additional service features are dependent on the support levels. Current available checks and service features vary with your AWS support level agreements. The available checks covering performance and security areas at no cost for Developer support level are as follows:

• Performance Category: Service Limits

• Security Category: Security Groups - Specific Ports Unrestricted, AWS IAM Use, Amazon S3 Bucket Permissions, MFA on Root Account, Amazon EBS Public Snapshots, Amazon RDS Public Snapshots

All sets of AWS Trusted Advisor checks are fully available for AWS users holding Business or Enterprise support plans with AWS.

In addition to these full lists of checks, AWS Trusted Advisor also provides additional features and advantages for Business and Enterprise support level customers. The first one is the AWS Support API, which gives you the ability to refresh or retrieve AWS Trusted Advisor findings programmatically. Another important additional feature is Amazon Cloudwatch integration for automated alerts and proactive reaction capabilities to changes in AWS Trusted Advisor status checks. The service also provides the ability to monitor recent changes or check the status of your resources on the AWS Trusted Advisor dashboard to ensure you are up to date.

One Step Further: Optimizing Your AWS Environment with Your Business Objectives

AWS Trusted Advisor is definitely a helpful service to guide you on how to transform your AWS infrastructure with best practices to achieve efficiency and performance improvements. The service leads you to optimize your AWS infrastructure through various recommendations across service usage and configurations.

What is the next step? As your business evolves, aligning your business objectives with your cloud environment becomes an essential part of your cloud strategy. In line with infrastructure optimization, another AWS offering AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you review and gain a thorough understanding of your entire infrastructure with AWS best practices. The huge advantage of Well-Architected Reviews is that the review and optimization go beyond the resource level and address your business needs and objectives to achieve efficient cloud architecture. Let us say it again, succeeding in the cloud is a continuous work!

1. https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/technology/trusted-advisor/?nc1=h_ls