The NAT Gateway Bill Exploded. Add More Gateways?
NAT Gateway data processing is now your biggest line item. A teammate thinks it is just bandwidth. Defend where the cost really comes from.
the decision you defend
Cost Explorer shows NAT Gateway data processing charges have become your largest line item. Private-subnet instances pull large images and data from S3 and ECR. A teammate says it is just bandwidth, add another NAT gateway. What do you do?
the situation
The monthly AWS bill jumped and Cost Explorer points at NAT Gateway data processing as the single largest line item. The amount of data flowing through the gateway has been climbing as the platform grows.
context
Workloads run in private subnets and reach the internet through a NAT gateway. They pull container images from ECR on every deploy and read large objects from S3 constantly. There are currently no VPC endpoints configured. A teammate looked at the throughput and concluded the gateway is saturated, proposing to add a second NAT gateway to spread the load.
How this challenge works
Take a position on the decision above and defend it. A senior-engineer AI will push back over up to 5 rounds. When you are done, you are scored against a verified rubric so you can see exactly what a complete answer covers - these are learning prompts, not gotchas.