AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Trusted Advisor is a service on Amazon Web Services that inspects an account and gives real-time, best-practice recommendations across six categories: cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, service limits, and operational excellence. It flags issues such as misconfigured security groups that allow unrestricted access to specific ports, and it alerts customers when they are approaching their AWS Service Quotas limits. Fuller access to the complete set of Trusted Advisor checks is unlocked through higher AWS Support Plans tiers.
AI Practitioner focus
- Trusted Advisor generates account/workload recommendations across cost, performance, security, resilience, operational excellence, and service limits.
- It can flag infrastructure risks around an AI system but does not evaluate model quality, responsible-AI characteristics, or legal compliance.
Key points
- Evaluates the account against AWS best practices using automated checks, grouped into six categories:
- Cost optimization
- Performance
- Security
- Fault tolerance
- Service limits
- Operational excellence (added since the original five-category design still referenced in older CLF-C02 material)
- Flags misconfigured security groups that allow unrestricted access to specific ports.
- Sends alerts when resources in the account reach 80% of their service quotas.
- Customers on Business Support+, Enterprise Support, or AWS Unified Operations get full access to all Trusted Advisor checks across all six categories (the older CLF-C02 framing of “Business and Enterprise Support” still maps to this same full-access tier). Basic and Developer Support customers only get all checks in the Service Limits category plus a handful of specific Security and Fault Tolerance checks (public EBS/RDS snapshots, public S3 bucket permissions, root MFA, unrestricted security group ports, and STS global endpoint usage).
- AWS is discontinuing Developer Support and (plain) Business Support on January 1, 2027, folding existing customers into Business Support+.