Article originally posted on InfoQ. Visit InfoQ

Recently, AWS announced the general availability of a new capability for their Trusted Advisor service with Trusted Advisor Priority, allowing Enterprise Support customers prioritized and context-driven recommendations manually curated by the AWS account team based on their knowledge of the customer’s environment and the machine-generated checks from AWS Services.

AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that continuously analyzes customers’ AWS accounts and provides recommendations to help them follow AWS best practices and Well-Architected guidelines. The service currently implements over 200 checks in five categories: cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits. Depending on the level of support (AWS Basic Support, AWS Developer Support,  AWS Business Support, or AWS Enterprise Support), customers either have access to core security and service limits checks, or access to all checks.

With the Priority capability, Enterprise Support customers have a prioritized view of critical risks, which shows prioritized, contextual recommendations and actionable insights based on the business outcomes. In addition, it also surfaces risks proactively identified by the customers’ AWS account team to alert and address critical cloud risks stemming from deviations from AWS best practices. 

The capability was in preview earlier this year. The GA release now includes new features such as allowing delegation of Trusted Advisor Priority admin rights to up to five AWS Organizations member accounts, sending daily or weekly email digests to alternate contacts in the account, and allowing customers to set IAM access policies for Trusted Advisor Priority.

Sébastien Stormacq, a principal developer advocate at Amazon Web Services, explains in an AWS news blog post:

Trusted Advisor uses multiple sources to define the priorities. On one side, it uses signals from other AWS services, such as AWS Compute Optimizer, Amazon GuardDuty, or VPC Flow Logs. On the other side, it uses context manually curated by your AWS account team (Account Manager, Technical Account Manager, Solutions Architect, Customer Solutions Manager, and others) and the knowledge they have about your production accounts, business-critical applications, and critical workloads.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-trusted-advisor-new-priority-capability/

Other public cloud providers, such as Microsoft, offer similar services as AWS Trusted Advisor. Microsoft’s Azure Advisor analyzes customers’ configurations and usage telemetry and offers personalized, actionable recommendations to help customers optimize their Azure resources for reliability, security, operational excellence, performance, and cost. The recommendations stem from the Azure Well-Architected Framework.

AWS Trusted Advisor Priority is available in all commercial AWS Regions where Trusted Advisor is available, except the two AWS Regions in China. It is available at no additional cost for Enterprise Support customers.