Posted On: Jul 31, 2023

AWS NAT Gateway is now available in the AWS US West Phoenix Local Zone. AWS Local Zones is a type of AWS infrastructure deployment that places AWS compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large population, industry, and IT centers where no AWS Region exists today.

You can use AWS Local Zones to run applications that require single-digit millisecond latency for use cases such as real-time gaming, live video streaming, engineering simulations, AR/VR, and machine learning inference at the edge. Before this launch, customers had to route their traffic from the Phoenix Local Zone to another availability zone in the US West region to use a NAT Gateway, which resulted in additional latency to their applications. With this launch, you can prevent this additional latency by creating and using NAT Gateways in the Phoenix Local Zone.

An AWS NAT Gateway enables instances in your private subnet to securely connect to services outside the subnet, including the internet, using the NAT Gateway’s IP addresses and drops any unsolicited inbound traffic. You can also use AWS NAT Gateway to run large workloads behind a single IP address or to mask the IP addresses of their workloads behind the NAT Gateway’s IP address.

To learn more about VPC NAT Gateway, please visit our documentation. For more information on AWS Local Zones, please visit the AWS Local Zones website. The Location Webpage lists the available and announced Local Zones. You can enable AWS Local Zones from the Zone tab in Settings of the EC2 console, or ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup API.