AWS provides an oft overlooked tool available to accounts with “Business” or “Enterprise” level support called Trusted Advisor (TA). Trusted Advisor is a tool that analyzes your current AWS resources for ways to improve your environment in the following categories:
- Cost Optimization
- Security
- Performance
- Fault Tolerance
It rigorously scours your AWS resources for inefficiencies, waste, potential capacity issues, best practices, security holes and much, much more. It provides a very straightforward and easy to use interface for viewing the identified issues.
Trusted Advisor will do everything from detecting EC2 instances that are under-utilized (e.g. using an m3.xlarge for a low traffic NAT instance), to detecting S3 buckets that are good candidates for fronting with a CloudFront distribution, to identifying Security Groups with wide open access to a port(s), and everything in between.
In Amazon’s own words…
AWS Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and makes recommendations for saving money, improving system performance and reliability, or closing security gaps. Since 2013, customers have viewed over 1.7 million best-practice recommendations in AWS Trusted Advisor in the categories of cost optimization, performance improvement, security, and fault tolerance, and they have realized over $300 million in estimated cost reductions. Currently, Trusted Advisor provides 37 checks; the most popular ones are Low Utilization Amazon.
This week (7/23/2014) AWS just announced the release of the new Trusted Advisor Console.
Two new features of the TA console I found particularly noteworthy and useful are the Action Links and Access Management.
Action Links allow you to click a hyperlink next to an issue in the TA Console that redirects you to the appropriate place to take action on the issue. Pretty slick… saves you time jumping around tabs in your browser or navigate to the correct Console and menus. Action Links will also take the guess work out of hunting down the correct place if you aren’t that familiar with the AWS Console.
Access Management allows you to use AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management) credentials to control access to specific categories and checks within Trusted Advisor. This gives you the ability to have granular access control over which people in your organization can view and act on specific checks.
In addition to the console, Trusted Advisor also supports API access. And this wouldn’t be my AWS blog post without some kind of coding example using Python and the boto library. The following example code will print out a nicely formatted list of all the Trusted Advisory categories and each of the checks underneath them in alphabetical order.
#!/usr/bin/python
from boto import connect_support
conn = connect_support()
ta_checks = sorted(conn.describe_trusted_advisor_checks('en')['checks'],
key=lambda check: check['category'])
for cat in sorted(set([ x['category'] for x in ta_checks ])):
print "\n%s\n%s" % (cat, '-' * len(cat))
for check in sorted(ta_checks, key=lambda check: check['name']):
if check['category'] == cat:
print " %s" % check['name']Here is the resulting output (notice all 37 checks are accounted for):
cost_optimizing
---------------
Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances Optimization
Amazon RDS Idle DB Instances
Amazon Route 53 Latency Resource Record Sets
Idle Load Balancers
Low Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances
Unassociated Elastic IP Addresses
Underutilized Amazon EBS Volumes
fault_tolerance
---------------
Amazon EBS Snapshots
Amazon EC2 Availability Zone Balance
Amazon RDS Backups
Amazon RDS Multi-AZ
Amazon Route 53 Deleted Health Checks
Amazon Route 53 Failover Resource Record Sets
Amazon Route 53 High TTL Resource Record Sets
Amazon Route 53 Name Server Delegations
Amazon S3 Bucket Logging
Auto Scaling Group Health Check
Auto Scaling Group Resources
Load Balancer Optimization
VPN Tunnel Redundancy
performance
-----------
Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS (SSD) Volume Attachment Configuration
Amazon Route 53 Alias Resource Record Sets
CloudFront Content Delivery Optimization
High Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances
Large Number of EC2 Security Group Rules Applied to an Instance
Large Number of Rules in an EC2 Security Group
Overutilized Amazon EBS Magnetic Volumes
Service Limits
security
--------
AWS CloudTrail Logging
Amazon RDS Security Group Access Risk
Amazon Route 53 MX and SPF Resource Record Sets
Amazon S3 Bucket Permissions
IAM Password Policy
IAM Use
MFA on Root Account
Security Groups - Specific Ports Unrestricted
Security Groups - Unrestricted AccessIn addition to the meta-data about categories and checks, actual TA check results and recommendations can also be pulled and refreshed using the API.
While Trusted Advisor is a great tool to quickly scan your AWS environment for inefficiencies, waste, potential cost savings, basic security issues, and best practices, it isn’t a “silver bullet” solution. It takes a specific set of AWS architectural understanding, skills, and experience to look at an entire application stack or ecosystem and ensure it is properly designed, built, and/or tuned to best utilize AWS and its array of complex and powerful building blocks. This where a company like 2nd Watch can add immense value in a providing a true “top down” cloud optimization. Our architects and engineers are the best in the business at ensuring applications and infrastructure are designed and implemented using AWS and cloud computing best practices with a fierce attention to detail and focus on our customers’ success in their business and cloud initiatives.
-Ryan Kennedy, Senior Cloud Architect
