Trusted Advisor ‘Your Best Buddy’

Ever since AWS has launched ‘Trusted Advisor’ in 2013, customers have started leveraging lot of its recommendations towards Cost optimization, Improve Performance & Security, Fault tolerance and Service limits. As per the market study, in the last 7 years, the average cost savings just by using AWS native tools, primarily the Trusted Advisor is >500 million dollars.

Trusted Advisor is your auto managed cloud expert, which glances at your overall cloud environment and provides easy to read details how well you are with cost savings, performance and security. As the business expands, the cloud assets would keep growing in size, so it becomes all the more important to know where you are spending most of your funds, and which assets have the liability gaps. The user interface is simple and number of features it offers is best in class. The Comprehensive & solution agnostic approach are commendable.

The below example, depicts the potential monthly savings can be $7,516

With Trusted Advisor, customers can automatically manage their cloud health of their systems and cost primarily focusing on

• Reducing component requirement
• Improving the usage of available resources to the fullest
• Detecting Inefficiencies
• Security vulnerabilities
• Possible cost savings

It can perform nearly 72 checks and provide best practices/recommendations to mitigate the risk of performance degradation, overspend on cloud services. In this blog, the checks were listed at high level by AWS service wise

Automation

In the era of cloud automation, you can leverage Trusted Advisor to automate best practices by integrating with other AWS services , such as SNS, Lambda, Cloudwatch etc. You can do it in two phases.

Setup Automation

Build Automation

• You can enable weekly email notifications from Trusted Advisor (TA) in the Preferences page of the Trusted Advisor console.
• You can use Amazon CloudWatch Events to monitor the status of TA checks.
  • You can then use Amazon CloudWatch to create alarms on TA metrics.
  • These alarms notify you when the status changes for a Trusted Advisor check, such as an updated resource or a service quota that is reached.
  • You can stop EC2 instances with low utilization
  • You can create snapshots for EBS volumes with no recent backup
  • Enable versioning
  • Enable Autoscaling, incase of more high utilized Instances
  • Delete Exposed IAM Keys, strengthen password policies and MFA etc.

Parting words

Trusted Advisor provides wealth of information which helps customers to take cost, performance and Security conscious decisions.

There are multiple AWS customers who got benefited by using Trusted Advisor.

“Medlife has accelerated release cycles from twice a week to twice a day. It has taken the advantage of the AWS Trusted Advisor feature to pinpoint potential cost reductions”

“PatSnap has also turned on all the features offered by AWS Trusted Advisor to make it easier to patch platform vulnerabilities, improve security configurations, and intelligently provision resources to control costs. AWS has brought two main benefits to PatSnap: 50% reduction in costs, and 100% increase in product iteration speed.

“Intellect SEEC also plans to better adopt AWS Trusted Advisor to optimize its costs and manage capacity.The cost effectiveness of AWS means we have been able to reduce IT costs for clients by 60%.Reduced IT management time by 85 percent, Saves customers on average $300,000 by avoiding on-premises installations, Speeds up time to market for its services by tenfold,Achieved 99.99 percent availability”

“Flatiron also relies on services such as AWS Trusted Advisor and Amazon CloudWatch for additional auditing and security capabilities”.

“GE Oil & Gas is migrating 500 applications to the cloud as part of a major digital transformation. This project is helping the General Electric division achieve a 52 percent decrease in IT costs, greater speed to market, and the agility to compete even better in an industry experiencing immense market challenges”.

“Ohpen , the Financial software-as-a-service provider created a platform that banks can use to administer retail mutual funds and savings accounts for their customers. Using AWS, Ohpen can rapidly deliver new features and estimates it can help its institutional customers cut their costs by up to 80 percent.”

The actionable recommendations help customers to drive the potential that can be exercised in real time towards their cloud optimization and lay the roadmap for future implementation.