Amazon Trusted Advisor accommodates a new update: free trial and new features now available.

For those who unfamiliar the AWS Trusted Advisor is an application that monitors your Amazon Web Service environment and makes recommendations to help you more or less save money, improve performance, or close security gaps.

This was available to AWS customers who have signed up for the Business or Enterprise levels of AWS Premium Support; henceforth the AWS Trusted Advisor is available to all AWS customers.  This means that you can now take advantage of 27 different checks conducted by the Advisor, regardless of your AWS support level.

The new features include: enhancement of the Trusted Advisor's user interface to make it cleaner and easier to use, added a new suppress feature to allow you to hide the results of certain checks and the Summary section gives you a graphical indication of the results of running all of the checks.

Therefore we have:

RDS Security Group Access Risk: to examine RDS Security Group configurations and warns when a security group rule potentially grants overly permissive access to your database.

EC2 Security Group Rule Proliferation: to examine the configuration of your EC2 Security Groups and flags Security Groups when they have potentially excessive rule quantities.

EC2 Instance Security Group Rule Proliferation: to examine the number of EC2 security group rules that are bound to individual EC2 instances, and flags the EC2 instance when it is bound by an excessive number of security group rules.

Idle RDS Instances: to examine your RDS DB instances and flags any MySQL or Oracle instances that appear to be idle.