[luhn]

I do the same thing. Without IPv4 for an EC2 instance, your options are:

- No outbound internet access

- IPv6-only outbound internet access

- NAT, for an addition monthly and per-GB fee

Given you can assign a public IPv4 address at no additional cost and have everything just work, there's little reason not to have one.

[outworlder]

So you have everything in a public subnet? That's asking for trouble.

Sure, if you have a tiny deployment you may not care (and the NAT fees may be a significant portion of that).

At some point, the NAT fees are noise - it amounts to ~ a dollar per day in us-west-2. Data processing charge is $0.045

It becomes way more valuable to ensure IT security, regulators and auditors that no, no inbound connections are allowed no matter what anyone does with the security group rules.

Also note that the AWS managed NAT gateways haven't been there forever. The option, before they were available, was to use one or more of your instances to NAT traffic. That's still available and could be an alternative, while reducing your potential footprint.