Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway
A NAT gateway is a NAT service that enables secure outbound internet connectivity for instances in private subnets.
- Managed Service: Fully managed by AWS with built-in redundancy and high availability
- Security Enhancement: Allows outbound connections while preventing unsolicited inbound connections from the internet
- Bandwidth Scaling: Automatically scales bandwidth up to 100 Gbps based on your workload requirements
note
NAT Gateway provides secure internet access for private resources, high availability, and requires no management overhead.
Use case: You can use a NAT gateway so that instances in a private subnet can connect to services outside your VPC but external services can't initiate a connection with those instances.
- Ideal for private database servers, application servers, and backend services that need to download updates or access external APIs
- Supports both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic with separate gateway types
- Provides better performance and availability compared to NAT instances
