AWS NAT Gateway Costs: Why Your Kubernetes Bill Is Higher Than Expected and How to Reduce It
By
KloudAudit
Summary
This article explains why AWS NAT Gateway charges can silently balloon to hundreds of dollars for teams running Kubernetes on AWS. It describes what a NAT Gateway does (enabling private subnet resources to reach the internet), why costs grow unexpectedly (data processing fees, cross-AZ traffic, and high per-hour charges), and provides actionable fixes including using NAT instances, switching to a cheaper alternative like Cloudflare's offering, or optimizing architecture to reduce data transfer through the NAT Gateway.
Source
bskyAWS NAT Gateway Costs: Why Your Kubernetes Bill Is Higher Than Expected and How to Reduce Itcstu.ioKey quotes
· 3 pulledYou get your AWS bill. EC2 looks reasonable. RDS looks fine. Then there's a line item called 'NAT Gateway' sitting at $800 and you have no idea why.
This is the charge that catches almost every team running Kubernetes on AWS.
Here is exactly what it is, why it grows silently, and how to fix it in 20 minutes.
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