Cloud cost glossary

NAT gateway

A NAT gateway lets resources in a private subnet reach the internet for outbound connections, and it bills both an hourly rate and a per-GB data-processing fee.

Managed NAT gateways charge for every hour they run plus every gigabyte they process, on top of any normal egress charges on that traffic. Because the data-processing fee applies to all traffic through the gateway — including traffic to services in the same cloud — a busy NAT gateway can quietly become one of the larger networking line items.

Common ways to reduce NAT cost include using VPC/gateway endpoints for in-cloud service traffic so it bypasses the NAT gateway, and consolidating gateways where high availability across zones is not required.

AWS NAT Gateway pricing →

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Part of the SpendArk cloud cost & FinOps glossary.