AWS Compute Optimizer

• AWS Compute Optimizer helps analyze the configuration and utilization metrics of the AWS resources.
• reports whether the resources are optimal, and generates optimization recommendations to reduce the cost and improve the performance of the workloads.
• delivers intuitive and easily actionable resource recommendations to help quickly identify optimal AWS resources for the workloads without requiring specialized expertise or investing substantial time and money.
• provides a global, cross-account view of all resources
• uses machine learning to analyze historical utilization metrics from CloudWatch for the last 14 days (default) or up to 93 days with enhanced infrastructure metrics.
• provides graphs showing recent utilization metric history data, as well as projected utilization for recommendations, which can be used to evaluate which recommendation provides the best price-performance trade-off.
• Analysis and visualization of the usage patterns can help decide when to move or resize the running resources, and still meet your performance and capacity requirements.
• generates rightsizing recommendations for the following resources:
  • Elastic Compute Cloud – EC2 instances
  • EC2 Auto Scaling groups
  • Elastic Block Store – EBS volumes
  • Lambda functions
  • Elastic Container Service – ECS services on AWS Fargate
  • Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL engines)
  • Commercial software licenses (Microsoft SQL Server on EC2)
• generates idle resource recommendations to identify unused resources that can be deleted or stopped:
  • EC2 instances and EC2 Auto Scaling groups
  • EBS volumes
  • ECS services on Fargate
  • RDS instances
  • NAT Gateways
  • DynamoDB provisioned tables
  • ElastiCache (Redis and Valkey) clusters
  • MemoryDB clusters
  • DocumentDB clusters (provisioned and serverless)
  • WorkSpaces desktops
  • SageMaker endpoints

Compute Optimizer Key Features

Enhanced Infrastructure Metrics

• Paid feature that extends the metrics analysis lookback period from the default 14 days to up to 93 days (3 months).
• Provides improved recommendation quality for EC2 instances, EC2 Auto Scaling groups, and RDS DB instances by analyzing a longer history of utilization data.
• Costs approximately $0.25 per resource per month (~$0.0003360215 per resource per hour).

Extended Lookback Period

• For EBS volumes and ECS services, the lookback period can be extended from the default 14 days to 32 days at no additional cost.

External Metrics Ingestion

• Integrates with observability partners — Datadog, Dynatrace, Instana, and New Relic — to ingest external memory utilization metrics for EC2 rightsizing.
• Requires at least 30 consecutive hours of memory utilization metrics from the observability product.
• When enabled, Compute Optimizer prioritizes external memory metrics over CloudWatch memory data.
• Does not support EC2 instances that are part of Auto Scaling groups.

Graviton-based Instance Recommendations

• Provides recommendations to migrate from x86-based instances to AWS Graviton-based instances for improved price-performance.
• Helps identify workloads that can benefit from up to 40% better price-performance with Graviton processors.

Aurora I/O-Optimized Recommendations

• Analyzes the instance, storage, and I/O costs for Aurora Standard clusters and recommends whether switching to Aurora I/O-Optimized would be more cost-effective.

Commercial Software License Recommendations

• Generates recommendations for Microsoft SQL Server licenses on EC2 instances.
• Helps identify opportunities to downgrade SQL Server editions, saving up to 74% on license costs.

Compute Optimizer Pricing

• The base service is free — analyzes the default 14-day or 32-day lookback period at no charge.
• Enhanced infrastructure metrics is a paid feature at $0.0003360215 per resource per hour (~$0.25/resource/month).
• You only pay for the underlying AWS resources (EC2, EBS, Lambda, etc.) and CloudWatch monitoring.

Compute Optimizer Requirements

• EC2 instances and Auto Scaling groups require at least 30 hours of CloudWatch metric data in the past 14 days.
• Compute Optimizer does not generate EC2 rightsizing recommendations for Spot Instances (but does generate idle recommendations for Spot).
• Must opt in to the service — supports standalone accounts, member accounts of an organization, or organization-level opt-in by the management account.
• Auto Scaling group rightsizing requires a single instance type or mixed types within C, M, or R families (no mixing AMD/Intel, x86/Graviton).

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

• Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
• AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
• AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
• Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.