Difficulty: Easy
Description
We identified several NAT Gateways in your account that are not in use. NAT Gateways are charged both per hour and per GB of data processed, so idle gateways incur ongoing hourly costs with no benefit.
Selection Criteria
The NAT Gateway has less than 1 MB of outgoing traffic in the last 31 days.
The NAT Gateway has 0 active connections in the last 31 days.
Expected Saving
NAT Gateway costs $0.045/hour (~$32/month) regardless of traffic, plus $0.045/GB of data processed.
Deleting an idle gateway eliminates the hourly charge entirely.
Operational Impact
Breaking changes: Deleting a NAT Gateway removes outbound internet access for all instances in the associated subnets that route through it.
⚠️ Warning — Verify dependencies: Before deletion, confirm that no EC2 instances, Lambda functions, or other services in the associated subnets rely on the gateway for outbound connectivity.
⚠️ Warning — Irreversible: Deletion is permanent. Restoring outbound access requires creating a new NAT Gateway and updating the relevant route tables.