What is AWS Trusted Advisor?

In today's fast-paced world of cloud computing, businesses are continually seeking ways to optimize their operations, streamline costs, and maximize the value of their cloud investments. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been a frontrunner in providing a wide array of cloud services and tools to help businesses achieve these goals. Among these tools, AWS Trusted Advisor stands out as a powerful resource for optimizing costs and improving the overall health of your AWS environment. That said, there are some notable problems that AWS Trusted Advisor users have.

In this blog, we will describe what an AWS Trusted Advisor is, its strengths and weaknesses, and explore its significance in cloud financial operations or FinOps.

What is AWS Trusted Advisor?

AWS Trusted Advisor is a tool Amazon Web Services offers as part of its support packages.

AWS Basic Support and AWS Developer Support customers can access core security checks and checks for service quotas. AWS Business Support and AWS Enterprise Support customers can access all checks, including cost optimization, security, fault tolerance, performance, and service quotas. Source

Trusted Advisor analyzes your AWS infrastructure and provides recommendations to help you follow best practices in five key areas:

1. Cost Optimization: Trusted Advisor identifies opportunities to reduce costs by identifying unused or underutilized resources, suggesting reserved instance purchases, and highlighting potential savings.
2. Performance: It offers suggestions to improve system performance by analyzing security groups, load balancers, and other resources to ensure they adhere to best practices and enhance performance.
3. Security: Trusted Advisor helps you enhance your security posture by identifying potential security vulnerabilities in your AWS environment, such as exposed ports or overly permissive security group rules.
4. Fault Tolerance: This area focuses on increasing the resiliency of your AWS infrastructure by recommending ways to distribute your resources across multiple Availability Zones, enabling high availability.
5. Service Limits: Trusted Advisor also monitors your AWS service limits and notifies you if you're approaching any resource limits, allowing you to request limit increases when necessary.

Why Trusted Advisor Matters in FinOps

FinOps, or Cloud Financial Operations, is a discipline that focuses on managing the costs of cloud services efficiently. Trusted Advisor can play a role in the FinOps process by helping organizations understand where there’s cloud cost waste.

Here's how Trusted Advisor contributes to FinOps success:

1. Waste Visibility Across AWS Organization: Trusted Advisor provides a comprehensive view of your AWS infrastructure in a single place, highlighting areas where cost savings are possible.
2. Real-time Recommendations: The tool continuously monitors your AWS environment, offering real-time recommendations to ensure you get the most value out of your cloud investments. Having this updated in a single place saves many hours of manual work scanning your environment.
3. Native to AWS: It is definitely not free, but it is provided natively by AWS which means no new procurement cycles or vendor onboarding to start using it.

Where Trusted Advisor Falls Short

1. Cost: Trusted Advisor cost optimization is included in Business and Enterprise Support plans which are not cheap. As of September 2023, these plans can cost 3-7% of your AWS bill. Cloudthread is at least 1/10th of this price.
2. Not Discount Aware: Trusted Advisor estimates for cost savings don’t account for Reservations, Savings Plans, or Enterprise Discounts. This inflates the savings potential and decreases confidence in the recommendations. Cloudthread accounts for discounts when reporting savings potential.
3. Not Integrated into Workflows: Trusted Advisor is often looked at only by leadership or a central Cloud FinOps team and tracking progress on achieving the recommendations is happening in spreadsheets. Cloudthread provides integrations with Jira and Slack along with analytics for a central FinOps Team to convert recommendations into action.
4. Limited to Single Organization: Trusted Advisor can be set up for your AWS Organization (docs) but if your company has multiple AWS Organizations then you’ll have multiple different sources of truth. Cloudthread can provide a single pane of glass across many different AWS Organizations.
5. A limited list of recommendations: Trusted Advisor doesn’t cover all savings potential in your environment. Cloudthread covers 3x the savings opportunities. For details, see here.

Conclusion

AWS Trusted Advisor is a valuable tool. It empowers organizations to take control of their AWS spending, optimize resources, and enhance the security and performance of their cloud infrastructure. Particularly if you need Trusted Advisor’s full suite of recommendations, it can be a powerful tool. As discussed, it does have limitations and shortcomings that need to be considered given Support’s cost.

How Cloudthread can help?

Cloudthread is your trusted partner in achieving even greater success with AWS cost optimization. Unlike AWS Trusted Advisor, it's discount-aware, factoring in enterprise and committed use discounts like RIs and SPs, giving you a more accurate view of potential savings. With seamless workflow integration via Jira and Slack, Cloudthread turns recommendations into actionable tasks in your engineering sprints, ensuring swift cost-saving actions.

Gain control with in-depth savings analytics, track team savings, use leaderboards for incentives, and monitor progress through threads. Cloudthread offers all this with zero risk, requiring just a five-minute integration and providing a two-week free trial. Ready to unlock the full potential of AWS cost optimization with Cloudthread? Contact us today and supercharge your cloud savings journey! Your cost-efficient and high-performing AWS environment awaits!