How do I reduce data transfer charges for my NAT gateway in Amazon VPC?

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I want to reduce data transfer charges for my NAT gateway in my Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).

Resolution

Note: Before you begin, determine the major sources of traffic through your NAT gateway.

To reduce data transfer and processing charges, take the following actions:

  • Data transfer within the same Availability Zone is free. Check whether the resources behind the NAT gateway that send the most traffic are in the same Availability Zone as the NAT gateway. If the resources are in a different Availability Zone, then create new NAT gateways in the same Availability Zone as the resource.
  • Check whether the majority of your charges are from traffic to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or Amazon DynamoDB in the same AWS Region. If the charges are in the same Region, then set up a gateway VPC endpoint. Make sure that you route traffic to and from the AWS resource through the gateway VPC endpoint instead of through the NAT gateway.
    Note: When you use gateway VPC endpoints, you don't receive data processing or hourly charges.
  • Check whether the majority of your charges are from traffic to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) or Amazon DynamoDB in a different Region. If the charges are in a different Region, then access Amazon S3 through an Amazon S3 interface endpoint instead of a NAT gateway. 
  • Create an interface VPC endpoint for traffic through your NAT gateway that goes to AWS services that support interface VPC endpoints. For more information on cost savings, see AWS PrivateLink pricing.
  • Use AWS Trusted Advisor to check if your NAT gateways are configured with Availability Zone independence. Availability Zone independence helps to avoid cross-zone data transfer charges and fault tolerant architecture. For more information, see NAT Gateway Availability Zone Independence.

Note: Use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor and troubleshoot your NAT gateway.

Related information

How do I reduce data transfer charges for my NAT gateway in Amazon VPC?

Sample queries

Querying Amazon VPC flow logs

How do I analyze the Amazon VPC flow logs using Amazon Athena?

Using AWS Cost Explorer to analyze data transfer costs

AWS OFFICIAL
AWS OFFICIALUpdated 5 months ago
2 Comments

Hi! the first step is to determine what data transfers cost the most which can be identified using the following script :

| stats sum(bytes) as bytesTransferred by srcAddr, dstAddr

| sort bytesTransferred desc

| limit 10

  1. Next it is important to identify if there are any cross availability zone charges and see if there is a way to reduce those

More information can be found here: https://www.cloudzero.com/blog/reduce-nat-gateway-costs

Hope this helps!

Nitin_K
replied 8 months ago

Thank you for your comment. We'll review and update the Knowledge Center article as needed.

profile pictureAWS
MODERATOR
replied 8 months ago