As organizations scale their cloud infrastructure on AWS, two key services often emerge as essential for optimizing performance, security, and cost: AWS Trusted Advisor and the AWS Well-Architected Tool.
While both tools aim to ensure AWS workloads are secure, cost-effective, and reliable, they serve different purposes and offer distinct features. In this blog, we’ll dive deep into the comparison of AWS Trusted Advisor vs AWS Well-Architected Tool, exploring their strengths, use cases, and how they complement each other.
Understanding AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Trusted Advisor acts like a personalized cloud consultant, offering real-time insights and best practice recommendations for your AWS environment. It focuses on optimizing five core areas: Cost Optimization, Performance, Security, Fault Tolerance, and Service Limits.
Trusted Advisor continuously scans your resources and provides actionable recommendations based on current AWS usage, helping businesses to improve efficiency, cut costs, and mitigate risks.
Key Features of AWS Trusted Advisor
- Cost Optimization: Provides insights on unused or underutilized resources to reduce cloud spending.
- Performance: Analyzes your infrastructure and recommends ways to improve speed and efficiency.
- Security: Identifies security gaps, such as weak access controls or unencrypted data.
- Fault Tolerance: Highlights opportunities to improve resilience, such as setting up auto-scaling or adding redundancy.
- Service Limits: Alerts you when you're nearing AWS resource limits, helping to prevent potential outages.
Trusted Advisor offers two tiers of access: the free version provides basic checks, while the Business and Enterprise Support Plans unlock full functionality with more detailed recommendations.
Understanding AWS Well-Architected Tool
The AWS Well-Architected Tool (WAT) is designed to assess your workloads against AWS’s Well-Architected Framework. It evaluates five key pillars—Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization—to ensure your cloud architecture follows best practices.
The tool helps teams identify high-risk issues, prioritize them, and develop improvement plans to optimize their cloud infrastructure.
Key features of AWS Well-Architected Tool
- Framework Alignment: Assesses workloads against the five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework.
- High-Risk Issue Detection: Highlights critical architectural weaknesses and suggests improvements.
- Improvement Plans: Provides a structured approach to remediation through action items tailored to the workload.
- Continuous Improvement: Encourages regular reviews, ensuring that your cloud environment evolves with your business needs.
While Trusted Advisor focuses on operational checks, the Well-Architected Tool is more about strategic alignment with long-term best practices.
While both tools complement each other, Trusted Advisor is ideal for day-to-day checks, and the Well-Architected Tool is suited for periodic, deeper architecture reviews.
When to use AWS Trusted Advisor vs. AWS Well-Architected Tool
Understanding when to use each tool depends on your business goals and the maturity of your cloud architecture.
- Use AWS Trusted Advisor if:some text
- You need real-time operational insights into your cloud environment.
- You’re looking to quickly reduce costs, improve performance, or tighten security.
- Your team wants automated alerts for areas like service limits and security misconfigurations.
- You have access to AWS Business or Enterprise Support, unlocking all the features.
- Use AWS Well-Architected Tool if:some text
- You’re evaluating a new workload or preparing for a major cloud project.
- Your team wants a comprehensive, long-term review of architecture based on AWS best practices.
- You need structured guidance on how to remediate high-risk issues across operational excellence, security, and reliability.
- You want to continuously align your cloud architecture with evolving business goals.
For example, Applify's Well-Architected Partner Status positions them to help businesses implement long-term cloud strategies using the AWS Well-Architected Tool.
Combining the power of AWS Trusted Advisor and the Well-Architected Tool
Both tools work together to provide a comprehensive cloud management approach. While Trusted Advisor helps to maintain operational efficiency and catch issues before they escalate, the Well-Architected Tool offers a strategic, big-picture assessment of your architecture. Businesses can benefit from using both tools in tandem to ensure their AWS infrastructure is running optimally at both the operational and architectural levels.
Case study: How Applify leveraged AWS Well-Architected Tool for long-term success
One of our clients, a fast-growing e-commerce platform, was facing escalating cloud costs and performance issues as their user base expanded. By leveraging the AWS Well-Architected Tool, Applify helped them identify high-risk issues in their architecture, specifically in the areas of cost optimization and reliability. After implementing the recommendations, the client saw a 25% reduction in cloud costs and a 40% improvement in system reliability.
To read more about how the AWS Well-Architected Tool can transform your cloud strategy, check out our Well-Architected Review services.
Which tool is right for you?
When comparing AWS Trusted Advisor vs AWS Well-Architected Tool, the choice doesn’t have to be one or the other. Trusted Advisor ensures your AWS environment runs efficiently on a daily basis, while the Well-Architected Tool provides a long-term strategic outlook on architectural best practices. By leveraging both, your business can achieve not only operational efficiency but also a future-proof, scalable cloud infrastructure.
Interested in optimizing your AWS environment? Discover more about AWS Well-Architected Framework Lenses and how Applify can help you implement custom solutions tailored to your business.
