AWS Trusted Advisor

💡 Definition

AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides you with real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices. It inspects your AWS environment and makes recommendations across five categories to help optimize your infrastructure.

🔑 Key Concepts

• Five Categories of Guidance:
  1. Cost Optimization: Identifies underutilized resources to save money.
  2. Performance: Recommends ways to improve the speed and responsiveness of your applications.
  3. Security: Highlights security gaps and suggests improvements (e.g., S3 buckets exposed to public).
  4. Fault Tolerance: Points out potential vulnerabilities (e.g., single AZ deployments, lack of backups).
  5. Service Limits: Checks for usage nearing AWS service limits, which could impact operations.
• Core Checks vs. Full Checks: Basic accounts get access to a limited set of "Core Checks" (e.g., for S3 bucket permissions). Business and Enterprise support plans get access to all checks.

⚙️ How it Works

Trusted Advisor runs automated checks against your AWS account configuration and then presents findings and actionable recommendations in the console.

🎯 Use Cases

• Cost Savings: Identifying idle resources or opportunities for Reserved Instances.
• Security Posture: Discovering open ports or unencrypted S3 buckets.
• Reliability: Ensuring resources are configured for High Availability and backups.
• Operational Efficiency: Optimizing resource utilization.

💰 Pricing Model

• Basic/Developer Support: Access to Core Checks (Security and Service Limits).
• Business/Enterprise Support: Access to all checks across all five categories.

📝 Exam Tips (CLF-C02)

• Know the five categories of guidance.
• Provides real-time recommendations based on best practices.
• The number of checks available depends on your AWS Support Plan.

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See Also: * AWS Budgets * Cost Explorer * AWS Support Plans