Network Cost Optimization: Eliminating Unused NAT Gateway Costs
Food & Beverage Organization Achieves Dramatic Networking Savings
Executive Summary
A major Food & Beverage organization was experiencing increasing AWS networking costs due to unused NAT Gateways. After SKYXOPS conducted a detailed cloud cost and architecture review, several idle NAT Gateways were identified and safely removed. This resulted in a dramatic reduction in networking spend, achieved with zero operational risk or performance impact.
Business Context
The Organization: The organization operates key workloads such as order management, inventory systems, and outlet operations within private EC2 subnets.
The Situation: Over time, NAT Gateways were provisioned for multiple environments, though only the production environment actually needed them. This misalignment caused ongoing, unnecessary networking expenses.
Problem Statement
A review of AWS billing and traffic data revealed:
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High Recurring NAT Gateway Charges: Networking costs were significantly inflated by resources that delivered no business value.
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No Network Traffic: No network traffic flowing through the NAT Gateways for non-production environments.
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Multiple Unused NAT Gateways: These idle resources continued to incur costs despite delivering no business or technical value.
Approach & Solution
SKYXOPS implemented a systematic approach to identify and eliminate unused NAT Gateway costs.
Cost & Architecture Analysis
Examined AWS Cost Explorer for NAT cost trends, reviewed VPC route tables and NAT configuration, and analyzed CloudWatch metrics and VPC Flow Logs to validate real usage.
Validation
Ensured no EC2, Lambda, or EKS nodes depended on the unused NAT Gateways and confirmed that non-production environments were already using VPC Endpoints for required services.
Optimization Steps
Decommissioned all unused NAT Gateways, updated routing tables to reflect the optimized architecture, implemented budget alerts for proactive monitoring, and introduced additional VPC Interface Endpoints.
Key Results
The optimization delivered immediate and substantial improvements:
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Substantial Reduction: Unnecessary networking spend eliminated across all non-production environments.
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Zero Downtime: No service degradation or operational disruption during the optimization process.
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Improved Architecture: VPC architecture hygiene enhanced with streamlined networking configuration.
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Proactive Monitoring: Budget alerts and governance policies established for continuous optimization.
Conclusion
SKYXOPS delivered a high-impact, zero-risk cost optimization by eliminating unused NAT Gateways and implementing a more efficient architectural pattern. This initiative generated meaningful annual savings while ensuring the organization's cloud operations remained secure, scalable, and aligned with best practices.