[topspin]

> I hope there is another way of doing this that doesn't incur a doubling of our Azure monthly spending

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides NAT gateways for free. You pay (low) transit costs, but unlike AWS+Azure (idk about Google) the NAT gateway itself costs nothing, so you don't pay twice for NAT traffic.

All the traffic at these cloud operations gets handled by cloud scale SDN systems. I suspect the actual cost of the few tens of bytes necessary to track a NAT connection is lost in the noise of such platforms. So to my mind the high cost of some of these cloud operator's NAT gateways seems abusive.

Fortunately there is indeed competition that accommodates my view.