I'm looking to lower our data transfer costs at my organization. Right now, we have a centralized setup with three NAT gateways (one for each availability zone) in our Networking account, and each of our other accounts connects through a transit gateway. We're currently on the hook for around 80 TB of data transfer every month, and that number keeps climbing as we grow. I'm wondering if switching to an instance might be a more cost-effective solution. Am I making a mistake here? What potential limitations should I be aware of?
4 Answers
You'd still be paying for the data transfer, but you'll definitely save on the NAT Gateway costs, which can add up quickly.
One risk to consider is hitting the packets per second (PPS) limit on your instance. Throughput may not be an issue, but it could slow you down if you scale. Try running an EC2 instance alongside the NAT Gateway to see how it performs before fully committing.
But keep in mind, one instance won't provide the same redundancy or scalability as a NAT Gateway across three AZs. You may not hit the limit now, but as you grow, that could change.
You might want to check out fck-nat.dev. Having your own NAT instance is pretty common, but it really depends on your specific situation.
Thanks a lot!
And just so you know, fck stands for Flexible Connection Keeper!
Honestly, with that much bandwidth, it makes sense to host your own NAT gateway. Don't forget other options like using egress-only Internet gateways for IPv6, or deploying an instance in a public subnet for its own IPv4. If your transfers are mainly to AWS services, consider using a gateway endpoint instead!
True, managed NAT-GWs do charge for traffic (5 cents per GB processed) plus the standard VPC egress and hourly fees.