AWS Trusted Advisor will help to optimize your AWS environment by reducing cost, increasing performance, and improving security.  It provides real-time guidance to help you provision resources according to AWS Best Practices guidelines.

AWS Infrastructure Optimization

This service provides best practice recommendations in 5 categories:

• Cost Optimization: save money by eliminating unused/idle resources or using reserved capacity
• Fault Tolerance: increase availability and redundancy by using auto scaling, health checks, multi AZ, and backup
• Performance: check service limits, ensure you’re taking advantage of provisioned throughput, and monitor over-utilized instances
• Service Limits: checks for service limits >80% of service limit
• Security: close gaps by enabling security features and examining permissions

The status check is shown by 3 colors: green (no problem), yellow (investigation recommended), and red (action recommended).

Support Tiers

Core Checks and Recommendations

• Available to all customers by default for free
• Access to 7 core Trusted Advisor checks
  • S3 Bucket permissions
  • Security Groups – Specific ports unrestricted
  • IAM use
  • MFA on Root Account
  • EBS public snapshots
  • RDS public snapshots
  • Service Limits

Full Trusted Advisor Benefits

• Available for Business or Enterprise support plans
• Access to full set of Trusted Advisor checks
• Notifications: stay up-to-date with AWS resource deployment
  • Create alerts and automate actions with CloudWatch
• Programmatic access: retrieve and refresh results programmatically using AWS Support API

Resources

• AWS Trusted Advisor (AWS KB)
• Using Trusted Advisor as a Web Service (AWS Support User Guide)