Amazon Web Services Makes Four 'Trusted Advisor' Features Free
Amazon released new offerings Friday to make it easier and more affordable for AWS users to optimize their public clouds and register domain names.
Jeff Barr, Amazon’s chief cloud evangelist, announced in two blog posts that AWS is making available for free to all its users four features from its Trusted Advisor pack, and it is also reducing the price of its DNS service.
Trusted Advisor is a tool that helps AWS users observe best practices by inspecting their IaaS environment and returning feedback on improving cost savings, system performance, reliability and security.
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’Since we launched Trusted Advisor in 2013, our customers have viewed over 1.7 million best-practice recommendations for cost optimization, performance improvement, security, and fault tolerance and have reduced their costs by about 300 million dollars,’ Barr wrote.
The enhancements make available four best practices from the toolkit to AWS users at no cost: Service Limits Check, Security Groups-Specific Ports Unrestricted Check, IAM Use Check and MFA on Root Account Check.
Amazon is also moving Trusted Advisor into the AWS Management Console, Barr said in his post.
As for Route 53, Amazon’s DNS service for translating domain names into numeric IP addresses, the cloud provider is extending support for domain name registration and management as well as reducing the cost for queries through the service.
’With today's launch of Route 53 Domain Name Registration, you can now take care of the entire process from within the AWS Management Console (API access is also available, of course),’ Barr wrote.
The Route 53 news represents the 45th price reduction since Amazon launched its cloud in 2006.
Two of Amazon’s largest solution provider partners praised the announcement.
’As expected, AWS continues to innovate with features that help companies like 2nd Watch provide more value for our cloud customers. These types of tools deliver the functionality that our customers are looking for as they continue to move additional production workloads into AWS," Matt Gerber, VP of sales and marketing at 2nd Watch, told CRN.
The rate at which offerings change from major public cloud providers, such as AWS, add to the complexity faced by end users, said Datapipe VP of Marketing Craig Sowell.
Businesses are awash with questions such as, ’What does this mean to my current and future services? How can I take advantage of these new features? How will this impact our infrastructure budget? Do I need to take action or will I receive these benefits automatically? Will these changes impact the delivery of the app or service I provide to my customers?’ Sowell told CRN.
’As a service provider, it is our core responsibility to keep up to date with the most current changes so we can manage and optimize our clients’ infrastructure and they can focus on growing their business,’ Sowell said.
PUBLISHED AUG. 1, 2014