AWS Trusted Advisor Cloud Cost Management Strengths and Limitations

As organizations increasingly adopt cloud computing, managing costs becomes a critical consideration. While the cloud offers unparalleled flexibility and scalability, it also requires vigilant cost optimization to ensure that resources are used efficiently and costs are optimized. This is one of the things that AWS Trusted Advisor can help with.

AWS Trusted Advisor is a powerful tool that provides real-time guidance to help users optimize their AWS resources, improve performance, enhance security, and reduce costs. It leverages AWS best practices and uses machine learning algorithms to analyze an organization's AWS environment and provide actionable recommendations to optimize resource usage and minimize costs.

In this blog, we will take a closer look at AWS Trusted Advisor and explore the cloud cost optimization recommendations it provides.

What is AWS Trusted Advisor?

AWS Trusted Advisor is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that helps users optimize their AWS resources by providing recommendations based on AWS best practices. It monitors an organization's AWS environment, analyzes usage patterns, and identifies areas where resources can be optimized for improved performance, cost savings, and security.

AWS Trusted Advisor offers recommendations across five main categories:

1. Cost Optimization: This category provides recommendations to optimize costs by identifying unused resources, optimizing resource usage, and identifying opportunities for cost savings. It offers insights into idle instances, unutilized storage, underutilized RDS instances, and opportunities for Reserved Instance savings.
2. Performance: This category focuses on improving the performance of AWS resources. It provides recommendations on optimizing compute resources, optimizing Amazon S3 performance, and identifying opportunities for using Amazon CloudFront for content delivery.
3. Security: This category helps users enhance the security of their AWS resources. It provides recommendations on configuring security groups, enabling encryption, securing access keys, and identifying publicly accessible resources, among others.
4. Fault Tolerance: This category focuses on improving the resiliency of AWS resources. It provides recommendations on configuring Amazon RDS backups, enabling Amazon S3 versioning, and configuring Amazon Route 53 health checks, among others.
5. Service Limits: This category helps users stay within AWS service limits. It provides recommendations on monitoring and managing service limits for various AWS services to prevent potential issues caused by reaching service limits.

Cloud Cost Optimization Recommendations in AWS Trusted Advisor

Cost optimization is a critical aspect of managing cloud resources efficiently. AWS Trusted Advisor offers a variety of cost optimization recommendations that can help organizations reduce costs and improve their return on investment (ROI). Some of the key cloud cost optimization recommendations provided by AWS Trusted Advisor include:

1. Idle Instances: AWS Trusted Advisor identifies instances that have been running with low or no CPU utilization for a significant period of time and recommend terminating or stopping them to save costs.
2. Unutilized Storage: This recommendation identifies unused Amazon EBS volumes and Amazon S3 objects that can be deleted to avoid unnecessary storage costs.
3. Underutilized RDS Instances: AWS Trusted Advisor analyzes Amazon RDS instances for CPU utilization and recommends resizing or terminating underutilized instances to optimize costs.
4. Reserved Instance Optimization: This recommendation identifies opportunities to optimize the use of Reserved Instances, which are pre-purchased instances that offer significant cost savings compared to On-Demand instances. AWS Trusted Advisor analyzes the usage patterns of instances and makes recommendations on purchasing, modifying, or selling Reserved Instances to optimize costs.
5. Amazon S3 Cost Optimization: AWS Trusted Advisor provides recommendations to optimize Amazon S3 costs, such as identifying objects that are not frequently accessed and can be transitioned to Amazon S3 Infrequent Access or Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes, and identifying objects that can be deleted to save storage costs.
6. EC2 Instance Right-Sizing: AWS Trusted Advisor analyzes the usage patterns of EC2 instances and makes recommendations on resizing instances to better match their resource requirements, thereby optimizing costs.
7. Savings Plans: AWS Trusted Advisor offers recommendations on leveraging AWS Savings Plans, which are flexible pricing options that provide significant cost savings on EC2 and Fargate usage. Trusted Advisor analyzes usage patterns and makes recommendations on purchasing, modifying, or selling Savings Plans to optimize costs.
8. Elastic IP Addresses: AWS Trusted Advisor identifies unused Elastic IP addresses and recommends releasing them to avoid unnecessary costs. It also provides recommendations on converting Elastic IP addresses to Amazon EC2 Instance Connect for secure remote access without incurring additional costs.

What are the limitations of AWS Trusted Advisor?

1. It can be unaffordable. Trusted Advisor requires premium support, and premium support is not cheap. Their pricing page outlines scenarios where you pay between 3% and 10% of your cloud bill to use Trusted Advisor.
2. The cost optimization opportunities that surfaced aren’t comprehensive. While Trusted Advisor’s list is a great start, there are plenty of high-value cost-saving opportunities that aren’t included.
3. Lack of integration into your company workflows. Recommendations often aren’t enough to catalyze action. Recommendations need to integrate into existing engineering workflows with tools like Slack and Jira in order to become action.
4. Trusted Advisor lacks savings tracking analytics. Seeing how much money is wasted month over month and how many savings opportunities are acted on isn’t possible through Trusted Advisor natively.

Conclusion

AWS Trusted Advisor is a valuable tool that offers actionable recommendations to optimize AWS resources, improve performance, enhance security, and reduce costs. Cloud cost optimization is a critical aspect of managing cloud resources efficiently, and Trusted Advisor provides a wide range of recommendations to help organizations achieve cost savings and improve their overall AWS cost management strategy.

In conclusion, AWS Trusted Advisor is a powerful tool that organizations can use to make sure they’re following AWS best practices, including those around cloud cost efficiency.

How can Cloudthread help?

Whether or not you use AWS Trusted Advisor, Cloudthread can help you reduce cloud cost waste and gain confidence in your cost efficiency.

If you’re using Trusted Advisor, you can use Cloudthread to unlock many savings opportunities that aren’t covered by Trusted Advisor, attribute and track savings work, and integrate them into engineering workflows.

If you’re not using Trusted Advisor (and are weary of the price tag), you can use Cloudthread to get many of the Trusted Advisor cloud cost optimization insights in addition to all of Cloudthread’s proprietary saving opportunities and savings analytics features.