AWS Trusted Advisor Cost Insights for Up to 40% Savings

Did you know that 94% of companies overspend on cloud services? If you’re running workloads on AWS, you likely have untapped opportunities to reduce your cloud bill significantly. AWS Trusted Advisor is a powerful yet often underutilized tool that can help identify these savings—potentially up to 40% of your current AWS spend.

What is AWS Trusted Advisor?

AWS Trusted Advisor is a built-in service that evaluates your AWS environment against best practices across five pillars:

• Cost optimization
• Performance
• Security
• Fault tolerance
• Service limits

For businesses focused on reducing cloud costs, the cost optimization pillar provides actionable recommendations to eliminate waste and improve resource efficiency without compromising performance. Think of Trusted Advisor as your personal AWS financial consultant that works 24/7 to find savings opportunities in your infrastructure.

Trusted Advisor vs. Other AWS Cost Tools

Before diving into specific strategies, it’s important to understand how Trusted Advisor fits into AWS’s cost management ecosystem:

Tool	Primary Purpose	Key Strength
Trusted Advisor	Actionable recommendations	Proactive optimization insights
Cost Explorer	Historical analysis and forecasting	Granular cost visibility
Compute Optimizer	Detailed compute rightsizing	Performance impact analysis

While AWS Cost Explorer excels at helping you understand where your money is going, Trusted Advisor focuses on what you can do about it through specific, actionable recommendations. Think of Cost Explorer as your financial statement and Trusted Advisor as your investment advisor.

Key Cost Optimization Checks in Trusted Advisor

Trusted Advisor performs numerous checks to identify cost-saving opportunities. Here are the most impactful ones:

1. EC2 Instance Optimization

• Low Utilization EC2 Instances: Identifies instances running at less than 10% CPU utilization
• EC2 Reserved Instance Optimization: Recommends Reserved Instances based on your usage patterns
• Idle Load Balancers: Detects load balancers with minimal traffic

For example, rightsizing your EC2 instances based on Trusted Advisor recommendations can yield 20-30% savings on compute costs alone. One e-commerce company we worked with discovered they were running development environments on m5.xlarge instances when t3.medium instances would suffice for their workload patterns, resulting in an immediate 40% reduction in development environment costs.

2. Storage Optimization

• Amazon EBS Over-provisioned Volumes: Identifies volumes with consistently low IOPS usage
• Underutilized Amazon EBS Volumes: Highlights volumes with minimal activity
• Amazon S3 Buckets Without Lifecycle Policies: Suggests implementing lifecycle policies to automatically transition data to lower-cost storage tiers

Optimized EBS volume sizing and performance tuning based on these insights can significantly reduce your storage costs while maintaining performance. Many organizations discover through Trusted Advisor that they’re provisioning high-performance gp3 volumes with 3,000 IOPS when their actual workloads rarely exceed 100 IOPS.

3. Database Optimization

• Amazon RDS Idle DB Instances: Identifies database instances with minimal connections
• Amazon Redshift Reserved Node Optimization: Suggests Reserved Node purchases for consistent workloads
• Amazon RDS Reserved Instance Optimization: Recommends Reserved Instances for your database usage

Database optimization is often overlooked but can yield substantial savings. For instance, Trusted Advisor might identify development RDS instances that remain running 24/7 despite only being used during business hours—a simple scheduling solution could reduce costs by 65%.

4. Networking and Elastic Resources

• Unassociated Elastic IP Addresses: Highlights IPs you’re paying for but not using
• Underutilized NAT Gateways: Identifies gateways with minimal traffic
• Inactive VPC Endpoints: Detects endpoints you’re paying for but not utilizing

While each individual networking recommendation might save just a few dollars per month, these “small leaks” can collectively add up to thousands in unnecessary spending over time.

How to Maximize Value from Trusted Advisor

Simply having access to Trusted Advisor isn’t enough—you need a strategy to implement its recommendations effectively:

1. Prioritize High-Impact Recommendations

Not all recommendations deliver equal value. Focus first on:

• Reserved Instance opportunities (often 30-60% savings)
• Idle or underutilized resources (100% savings on terminated resources)
• Rightsizing opportunities for oversized instances (40-60% savings)

Create a spreadsheet to track recommendations by potential savings, implementation effort, and risk—then tackle the highest-return, lowest-effort items first.

2. Implement Regular Review Cycles

Set up weekly or monthly reviews of Trusted Advisor recommendations. Cloud environments change rapidly, and new optimization opportunities emerge constantly. Many organizations find success with a “Cost Optimization Tuesday” approach where a cross-functional team spends one hour reviewing and assigning action items based on Trusted Advisor insights.

3. Automate Implementation Where Possible

Use AWS APIs to programmatically implement Trusted Advisor recommendations. For example, you can automate the process of identifying and terminating idle resources or trading Reserved Instances that no longer match your needs.

Here’s a simple example of how you might automate the detection and notification of idle EC2 instances using AWS Lambda and the Trusted Advisor API:

import boto3
import json

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    support = boto3.client('support')

    # Get Trusted Advisor check results for low utilization EC2 instances
    response = support.describe_trusted_advisor_check_result(
        checkId='Qch7DwouX1',  # Low Utilization EC2 Instances check ID
        language='en'
    )

    # Process and send notifications about idle instances
    # Additional code would go here

4. Combine with Other AWS Cost Tools

For maximum impact, use Trusted Advisor alongside:

• AWS Cost Explorer: To understand historical spending patterns
• AWS Compute Optimizer: For detailed instance rightsizing recommendations
• AWS Budgets: To set alerts when spending exceeds thresholds

This multi-tool approach creates a comprehensive cost optimization strategy. Trusted Advisor identifies opportunities, Cost Explorer provides the historical context, Compute Optimizer offers detailed technical recommendations, and Budgets helps maintain spending discipline.

Access Tiers and Availability

Trusted Advisor offers different levels of functionality based on your AWS Support plan:

• Basic Support: Limited to 56 checks, primarily focused on service limits and security
• Business/Enterprise Support: Full access to all 482 checks, including comprehensive cost optimization recommendations

The most valuable cost optimization features require Business or Enterprise Support, which may seem like an additional expense but often pays for itself through the savings identified. For a mid-sized AWS environment spending $50,000 monthly, Business Support costs approximately $1,000/month but typically identifies $5,000-$15,000 in monthly savings opportunities.

Real-World Cost Savings Potential

While results vary by organization, our experience at Hykell shows that businesses implementing Trusted Advisor recommendations typically achieve:

• 10-15% savings from idle resource cleanup
• 20-30% savings from rightsizing instances
• 30-40% savings when combining all optimization strategies

For example, a media streaming company reduced their AWS bill by 30% simply by implementing Trusted Advisor’s Reserved Instance recommendations and cleaning up idle resources. They discovered multiple development environments with oversized instances that had been forgotten after project completions—a common scenario we encounter with many AWS customers.

Comparing AWS and GCP Cost Optimization

If you’re using multiple cloud providers, it’s worth noting that AWS and GCP pricing models differ significantly. While GCP offers automatic sustained use discounts, AWS requires more proactive management through tools like Trusted Advisor to achieve similar savings.

AWS’s approach demands more attention but can actually result in deeper savings for organizations willing to implement Trusted Advisor recommendations consistently. While GCP might automatically apply a 20% discount on instances running for a full month, AWS Reserved Instances can provide savings of 40-60% with a similar commitment.

Container Service Optimization

For organizations running containerized workloads on ECS and EKS, Trusted Advisor provides specific recommendations to optimize these services, including:

• Right-sizing container instances
• Identifying underutilized clusters
• Recommending Fargate vs. EC2 launch types based on usage patterns

Container environments present unique cost optimization opportunities. For example, Trusted Advisor might identify that your EKS cluster consistently runs at 30% capacity—suggesting you could reduce node count while maintaining performance. Or it might recommend switching certain workloads from Fargate (which charges per container) to EC2 (which charges per instance) when container density would make EC2 more cost-effective.

Automating Cost Optimization with Hykell

While Trusted Advisor provides valuable recommendations, implementing them requires time and expertise. Hykell offers automated AWS cost optimization that can:

1. Continuously analyze your AWS environment
2. Automatically implement high-impact, low-risk optimizations
3. Provide detailed reporting on savings achieved
4. Ensure performance isn’t compromised while reducing costs

Our approach goes beyond Trusted Advisor’s recommendations to deliver up to 40% savings on your AWS bill without requiring ongoing engineering effort. Instead of just identifying that an RDS instance is oversized, for example, Hykell can automatically right-size it during a maintenance window with appropriate rollback safeguards.

Take Action on Cost Insights

AWS Trusted Advisor is a powerful tool for identifying cost-saving opportunities, but its value comes from taking action on these insights. Start by reviewing your current Trusted Advisor recommendations, prioritize the highest-impact items, and implement them methodically.

For organizations looking to maximize savings without the manual effort, consider an automated solution like Hykell that can continuously optimize your AWS environment based on Trusted Advisor insights and beyond.

Remember: Every dollar saved on unnecessary cloud costs is a dollar that can be reinvested in innovation and growth for your business. The average organization is leaving 30% of their AWS spend on the table—what could your business do with that budget if it were reclaimed?