Is There a Better Way to Access GitHub from Private Subnets?

You're headed in the right direction, but don't forget about the potential risks of having a proxy as your single point of failure. We did something similar and kept a couple of proxy instances running with health checks in place. An auto-scaling group behind an ELB ensured redundancy, and we used Route53 failover for our backup NAT Gateway. One major hurdle was monitoring—just using CloudWatch wasn't enough. We had to create a custom endpoint to validate actual connectivity to GitHub, not just the server's status. Plus, be aware that the IP for outbound connections will reflect your proxy's IP, which caused issues for some APIs we were using.

The fck nat approach works quite well—those t4g.nano instances cost about $3/month while NAT Gateways start at $32/month plus data fees. The single point of failure challenge is genuine, but you can mitigate that by running two instances across different availability zones, with a Lambda function handling failover based on health checks. Before diving deeper into optimizing this, consider whether your GitHub traffic is significant enough for this solution; if you're mostly making small API requests, the savings from switching might not be worth the extra effort.

Creating your own AWS NAT instance is actually pretty straightforward. First, you need a t4g.nano instance in a public subnet with an Elastic IP. Just disable source/destination checks on it, enable IP forwarding in the kernel, and set up a masquerade firewall rule. Then, route your private subnets through this new instance. You can avoid the steep pricing of using a NAT Gateway. However, keep in mind this setup isn't monitored and may not handle heavy traffic as well as the Gateway. It's low-cost, but make sure your conditions fit this model!