Day 13 - Trusted Advisor

AWS Cost Optimisation Advent Calendar 2024

2 min read time

#aws

Welcome to day 13 of the unofficial AWS Cost Optimisation Advent Calendar 2024, where every day we will be sharing new tips or tricks to help you optimise your cloud costs before Christmas 2024.

Today there is one more tool provided by AWS that can help you to optimise your costs which we want to talk about: Trusted Advisor.

Many people associate it with compliance and best practice so is sometimes overlooked as a cost optimisation tool. However, as cost optimisation is one of the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, Trusted Advisor does include this and goes beyond what is provided in Compute Optimizer.

Some examples of cost optimisation checks that Trusted Advisor provides are:

• Idle Load Balancers: This check identifies Elastic Load Balancers that have had no traffic for the last 7 days.

• Unassociated Elastic IPs: This check identifies Elastic IPs that are not associated with any running EC2 instances.

• Underutilised EBS Volumes: This check identifies EBS volumes that have low I/O activity.

Setting Up

Unfortunately, Trusted Advisor is not free if you want the cost optimisation tips. You will need to have at least a Business Support plan to access this which starts at $100/month.

Once you are on a Business Support plan the cost optimisation element of Trust Advisor is activated automatically.

As such, depending on the size of your bill, you may want to consider a temporary upgrade to Business Support to get access to this tool.

At the time of writing there is no minimum contract length and it can be used on a pay as you go basis.

Conclusion

Trusted Advisor is a great tool to help you optimise your costs but your mileage may vary depending on the size of your bill and the cost of the Business Support.

If you are already on Business Support and didn't know about the cost optimisation features it provides, then hopefully this helped you.

If not, then maybe it makes a business case to upgrade to Business Support and get all the benefits of access to AWS engineers in addition to the cost optimisation features.

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