[colechristensen]

AWS just isn’t for hobbyists. You have to deal with the complexities of it because the real target customers want and need these things. There are plenty of other cloud services appropriate to your scale. It’s frustrating because you’re using the wrong tool for the job.

[throwaway2016a]

It's not the complexity (IMO), it's the cost. A hobbyist can easily set up NAT gateway but very often the NAT gateway is the most expensive part of the entire cloud bill. So the hobbyist is left with paying it or exposing their server to the public internet. It is very expensive for what should be something that is a built in part of VPCs.

Heck, even if you're not a hobbyist, I've worked with companies that have dev environments that mirror production (except smaller instance sizes) and now all the sudden you have a ton of NAT gateways eating money for providing a basic networking service.

[minkles]

It is but you need to consider cost first, not walk in with your existing assumptions about how to build stuff.

To be fair, large corporations probably should develop that mentality rather than shovelling vast amounts of cash into the problem and hoping it will go away one day (Hint: it doesn't).