Tagged
NAT Gateways are one of the most silent budget killers on AWS. AWS finally added Compute Optimizer support to find idle ones — but the real fix is knowing when not to use them at all.
Anonymized Series A SaaS bill: ~$40k/month for ~$8–9k of real work. July 2026 refresh — free S3/DynamoDB gateway endpoints, EBS zombies, RDS rightsizing, Trusted Advisor on Business Support+.
A healthcare estate was burning ~$200k/year on NAT. July 2026 refresh — NAT still ~$0.045/GB, free S3 gateway endpoints, Secrets Manager interface endpoints, and a VPC fix pattern that cut ~78%.
Data transfer is the most consistently underestimated cost in AWS architectures. It does not appear in compute estimates, it does not scale linearly, and it punishes microservices designs at exactly the moment growth feels like success.