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AWS NAT gateway is $0.045 per hour plus $0.045 per GB. The hourly fee seems mostly okay - for largish users, one or two per region is fine. $0.045 per GB is nuts. That’s $20.25/hour or $14580/mo for 1 Gbps. One can buy a cheap gadget using very little power that can NAT 1 Gbps at line rate for maybe $200 (being generous). One can buy a perfectly nice low power server that can NAT 10Gbps line rate for $1k with some compute to spare. One can operate one of these systems, complete with a rack and far more power than needed, plus the Internet connection, for a lot less money than $14580/mo. (Never mind that your $14580 doesn’t actually cover the egress fee on AWS.) A company with a couple full time employees could easily operate quite a few of these out of any normal datacenter, charge AWS-like fees, and make a killing, without breaking a sweat. But they wouldn’t get many clients because most datacenter customers already have a NAT-capable router and don’t need this service to begin with. In other words, the OpEx associated with a service like this, including the sysadmin time, is simply not in the ballpark of what AWS charges. |
If it's the former... oh sweet jesus, what? Probably way cheaper to just run an a1.large or something with Linux on it, plus a very short shell script to set up NAT. That's assuming well more than half of the traffic going through it is ingress from the internet. If it's 50/50 ingress and egress, then it's basically the same pricing as NAT gateway.