CASE 120 · DRIFTWOOD · 2023
NAT Gateway, replaced by an instance where the math says.
An internal IT team ran low-throughput VPCs (single-AZ test environments, internal dev clusters) where the NAT Gateway hourly cost dominated the real network usage. We replaced 14 of them with EC2-based NAT instances on t4g.nano with appropriate guardrails.
Internal IT
COST
2023
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
PER-VPC NETWORK COST
−83%
VPCS MIGRATED
14
PRODUCTION VPCS
0 CHANGED
ANNUAL SAVING
$48K
HOW IT WENT
NAT Gateway is the right answer for production — managed availability, automatic scaling, no maintenance burden. For low-volume internal environments, the hourly base cost was overwhelming the per-GB data-processing charge by 20x. NAT instances are old-school but still cheap.
We deployed t4g.nano NAT instances with Auto Scaling for replacement (not for capacity — these were single-instance setups). SSM handled patch management. CloudWatch metrics surfaced if any instance got close to saturation; the team would migrate that VPC back to NAT Gateway if so.
Per-VPC network cost on the migrated 14 environments dropped 83%. Production VPCs stayed on NAT Gateway untouched — we are not in the business of trading reliability for cost on the customer surface. The annual saving netted out at $48k after the engagement fee.
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