How Indeed scaled Governance across 1,000+ AWS accounts with AWS Trusted Advisor

Indeed is the #1 job site¹ in the world. With 615 million Job Seeker Profiles², people in more than 60 countries across 28 languages come to Indeed to search for jobs, post resumes, and research companies. Over 3.3 million employers use Indeed to find and hire new employees.

Supporting this massive scale requires resilient, well-architected cloud infrastructure. Indeed prioritizes operational excellence by following AWS Well-Architected framework recommendations, but they also embrace AWS with a decentralized approach to foster velocity, accuracy, and accountability. To balance these concerns, they developed an approach to score maturity and adapt to ongoing challenges.

The challenges of their decentralized approach included teams encountering service limits as they rapidly adopted AWS services. This led to reactive management that threatened the availability of scaling-dependent services. Additionally, they discovered inefficient resource utilization, such as underutilized Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) instances consuming significant budgets across multiple AWS accounts without centralized oversight. These issues, among others, highlighted the need for a more strategic approach to organization-wide visibility and governance as they continued to grow and scale their operations.

They recognized the need for a unified framework to enable meaningful inter-team comparisons and prioritize business outcomes. To achieve this, they leveraged AWS Trusted Advisor data through a data lake with robust reporting and visualization capabilities. This approach significantly improved their cloud governance, fostering continuous enhancement and optimization across they organization.

The Dual Impact of Decentralization: Accelerated Progress and Dispersed Insights

Indeed’s engineering culture prioritizes product team autonomy and data-driven results. This philosophy has served well and enabled rapid innovation and the ability to respond quickly to market demands in the competitive job search landscape. To meet demands, they scaled for growth within AWS to encompass over 1,000 accounts across product teams and inevitably encountered a fundamental tension: decentralized progress limiting overall organizational observability.

They had limited visibility into our overall cloud health posture. Cost optimization opportunities were distributed across accounts without a systematic way to identify the highest-impact improvements. Additionally, they needed mechanisms to benchmark team performance or share best practices organization-wide. With over 1,000 AWS accounts generating thousands of Trusted Advisor recommendations across six key areas—cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, service limits, and operational excellence—manual approaches couldn’t provide the comprehensive oversight and accountability they needed to meet for resilience with organization-wide initiatives such as improving high availability and having a disaster recovery plan.

Championing Trust: Education and Enablement as Pillars of Progress

Indeed began by creating cross-account IAM roles to enable centralized data collection. This enabled a centralized service account and a daily collection process to assume “trusted-advisor-data-collection” roles across all AWS accounts. The daily collection process, executed in Python, systematically collected Trusted Advisor data from all accounts, normalized the results, and subsequently uploaded them to a central Amazon S3 bucket. This bucket was partitioned by day to facilitate long-term retention. The collected data was then integrated into Indeed’s existing data warehouse, where it could be correlated with organizational ownership information to ensure comprehensive visibility. This crucial step linked each finding directly to the responsible team, ensuring comprehensive visibility across the organization.

Figure 1: Account architecture for centralized aggregation of Trusted Advisor findings

Once they addressed implementation, they drove adoption across teams by educating them to review their scores across the six pillars through self-service in their own environments pertaining to their AWS account. And addressed common resistance points by maintaining:

●      Transparency First: Rather than implementing top-down mandates, they made all data openly accessible, enabling teams to derive their own insights. This approach fostered trust and demonstrated value prior to requesting behavioral modifications.

●      Early Win Showcases: They identified immediate, high-impact improvements that teams could implement, thereby creating positive associations with the new system.

They present two specific examples where this implementation helped product teams.

1. Use Trusted Advisor data to identify idle RDS instances by platform teams

A company-wide report detailing teams with the highest incidence of idle databases enabled platform teams to focus optimization efforts where they would achieve the most significant cost reductions. With 44% of RDS instances identified as idle, this singular initiative yielded immediate returns on investment and illustrated to teams how centralized data could augment existing optimization endeavors.

Figure 2: Idle RDS instances per department

2. Proactive service limit management

Previously, teams discovered service limits reactively when they were impacted —such as throttled Amazon DynamoDB operations. With centralized Trusted Advisor monitoring, teams began receiving early warnings when service limits moved from “OK” to “Warning” status across their AWS Accounts. In one instance, the early alert system identified that one of 17 DynamoDB tables was approaching its read capacity service limit in a production account. This early warning allowed the team to proactively request a quota increase before customers were affected.

Building on this momentum, Indeed focused on scaling these benefits across the organization by democratizing cloud health data. The integrated data warehouse combines Trusted Advisor metrics with Indeed’s ownership information, powering dashboards that allow teams to visualize cloud health, benchmark performance, and identify optimizations. This approach not only improved cloud stewardship across the organization but also enhanced developer productivity by providing clear visibility into how resource allocation choices affect cost optimization.

Excellence as Competitive Advantage

At Indeed, the evolution of cloud governance, achieved through centralized Trusted Advisor data, transcends mere operational enhancement; it has emerged as a strategic differentiator directly influencing their capacity to effectively serve job seekers and employers. By correlating cloud health metrics with business outcomes, they established links between technical excellence and competitive advantage. Teams that proactively manage their service limits encounter fewer outages, optimized resource utilization translates into cost reductions suitable for reinvestment, and an elevated security posture fosters trust.

Their vision extends beyond current capabilities as they develop integration between Trusted Advisor data and existing service availability metrics within their data warehouse. Then they can answer critical questions: Which recommendations provide the greatest availability improvements? How do optimizations impact customer experience? Which teams’ cloud health improvements correlate most strongly with business outcomes?

Conclusion

Not all organizations have access to data lakes with ownership information or service health metrics. For those customers, several excellent starting points are available: AWS Trusted Advisor Organizational View provides centralized visibility into all Trusted Advisor findings across AWS accounts, while the Trusted Advisor dashboard from Cloud Intelligence Dashboards on AWS collection offers rich visualization and analytics capabilities built on Amazon QuickSight. These Cloud Intelligence Dashboards provide pre-built, customizable reporting that can jumpstart your Trusted Advisor optimization program without requiring extensive data engineering resources.

Success comes from combining the right tooling—whether a custom data lake solution, Organizational View, or Cloud Intelligence Dashboards—with creating a culture that actively adopts and acts on Trusted Advisor recommendations. Organizations need comprehensive visibility across complex environments, democratized access that empowers every team member, and cultural alignment that treats cloud stewardship as core to organizational mission rather than overhead to be minimized.

¹ Comscore, Total Visits, March 2025
² Indeed data (worldwide), job seeker accounts that have a unique, verified email address

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