AWS Trusted Advisor performs a variety of checks across different categories to assess your AWS environment and provide recommendations for optimization, cost reduction, security improvement, fault tolerance, and performance enhancement. These checks are organized into five pillars:
1. Cost Optimization:
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Idle Resources: Identifies resources that have been idle for an extended period, such as unattached Elastic IP addresses, unused Amazon EC2 instances, and unassociated Elastic Load Balancers.
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Underutilized Resources: Recommends resizing or terminating resources that are underutilized, such as EC2 instances with low CPU utilization or EBS volumes with low I/O activity.
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Reserved Instance Optimization: Analyzes your EC2 usage and suggests purchasing Reserved Instances to reduce costs, based on your usage patterns.
2. Performance:
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EC2 Instance Optimization: Recommends resizing EC2 instances to better match your workload requirements and improve performance.
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Elastic Load Balancer Optimization: Provides recommendations to optimize Elastic Load Balancers for better performance and cost efficiency.
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RDS Instance Optimization: Suggests resizing or modifying Amazon RDS instances to better meet performance and cost requirements.
3. Security:
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Security Group Analysis: Identifies overly permissive security group rules and recommends tightening security controls to minimize exposure to potential threats.
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IAM Access Key Rotation: Recommends rotating IAM access keys periodically to enhance security and reduce the risk of unauthorized access.
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S3 Bucket Permissions: Alerts you to S3 buckets with open or unrestricted access and recommends restricting permissions to prevent data exposure.
4. Fault Tolerance:
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High Availability: Evaluates your architecture for high availability and recommends best practices such as using Multi-Availability Zone deployments and configuring auto-scaling.
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EBS Snapshot Monitoring: Recommends enabling EBS snapshot monitoring to detect issues with snapshot creation and improve fault tolerance.
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RDS Multi-AZ Configuration: Advises configuring Amazon RDS instances for Multi-AZ deployment to enhance fault tolerance and durability.
5. Service Limits:
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Resource Limits: Alerts you when you're approaching or exceeding service limits in your AWS account, helping you avoid service disruptions and plan for scaling requirements.
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API Request Limits: Monitors API request rates and alerts you if you're approaching limits that could affect application performance or availability.
These are just a few examples of the checks performed by AWS Trusted Advisor. Each check provides detailed information about the issue, its impact, and recommendations for remediation. By reviewing and addressing the recommendations provided by Trusted Advisor, you can optimize your AWS environment, improve security, and reduce costs while ensuring compliance with AWS best practices.
