Your NAT Gateway is a tax on every download
Hey 👋🏽
NAT Gateways are one of those things you set up once and never look at again (probably!) 😅
Until NatGateway-Bytes shows up near the top of the bill, filed under EC2-Other - thanks AWS! I think they've made this on purpose to hide these significant networking related costs somewhere and made it hard to reflect on!
The hourly fee is predictable, sure. But the per-GB fee grows with every image pull and every npm install, and nobody ever approved it as a cost decision 😬 In the worst case, you're billed 3 times, if the NAT gateway also moves data across zones.
In this issue: where NAT costs come from, why CI runners are the worst case and some nice mitigations to avoid most of the nasty costs 👀
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📚 This Week's Deep Dive
In The second part is the one that gets people. Inbound data from the internet is free on AWS. Send it through a NAT Gateway and you pay for it anyway. Nobody decides to spend more on NAT. A team adds a CI pipeline, a node pool scales up, a service moves to a bigger base image. None of it looks like a cost decision in code review. |
📰 This Week in AWS🔄EventBridge rebuilt its custom event buses
⚡Lambda SnapStart works with container images
📨SNS messages can be 1 MiB now
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Start with one subnet. Pull NatGateway-Bytes from Cost Explorer, find out where the traffic goes, fix the biggest source, and check again a week later.
Found something odd in your own NAT bill? Hit reply and tell me what it was.
See you next week! 🙏
Tobi & Sandro