[blibble]

> but I would not go so far as to say “NAT has a stateful firewall”-

> I hear such takes all the time and its really frustrating

maybe you'd be less frustrated if you understood what people were saying, because I didn't say that

AWS already do 1:1 NAT and there's additionally a stateful firewall, which necessitates connection state tracking

adding the extra few bytes to do port translation shouldn't vastly increase the memory required

> incidentally it is usually programmers who think they understand everything about networks because they know how tcp operates.

from someone who has written a commercial packet filter: in terms of complexity, TCP blows the preceding layers of the stack out of the water