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Reading time: 11 minutes
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Main Learning: Measure NAT traffic first. CI runners rarely need NAT at all.
Hey Reader 👋🏽 NAT Gateways are one of those things you set up once and never look at again (probably!) 😅 Until NatGateway-Bytes shows up near the top of the bill, filed under EC2-Other - thanks AWS! I think they've made this on purpose to hide these significant networking related costs somewhere and made it hard to reflect on! The hourly fee is predictable, sure. But the per-GB fee grows with every image pull and every npm install, and nobody ever approved it as a cost decision 😬 In the worst case, you're billed 3 times, if the NAT gateway also moves data across zones. In this issue: where NAT costs come from, why CI runners are the worst case and some nice mitigations to avoid most of the nasty costs 👀
Start with one subnet. Pull NatGateway-Bytes from Cost Explorer, find out where the traffic goes, fix the biggest source, and check again a week later. Found something odd in your own NAT bill? Hit reply and tell me what it was. See you next week! 🙏 Tobi & Sandro
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