NAT gateways - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

NAT gateways

A NAT gateway is a Network Address Translation (NAT) service. You can use a NAT gateway so that instances in a private subnet can connect to services outside your VPC but external services cannot initiate a connection with those instances.

When you create a NAT gateway, you specify one of the following connectivity types:

  • Public – (Default) Instances in private subnets can connect to the internet through a public NAT gateway, but cannot receive unsolicited inbound connections from the internet. You create a public NAT gateway in a public subnet and must associate an elastic IP address with the NAT gateway at creation. You route traffic from the NAT gateway to the internet gateway for the VPC. Alternatively, you can use a public NAT gateway to connect to other VPCs or your on-premises network. In this case, you route traffic from the NAT gateway through a transit gateway or a virtual private gateway.

  • Private – Instances in private subnets can connect to other VPCs or your on-premises network through a private NAT gateway. You can route traffic from the NAT gateway through a transit gateway or a virtual private gateway. You cannot associate an elastic IP address with a private NAT gateway. You can attach an internet gateway to a VPC with a private NAT gateway, but if you route traffic from the private NAT gateway to the internet gateway, the internet gateway drops the traffic.

Both private and public NAT gateways map the source private IPv4 address of the instances to the private IPv4 address of the NAT gateway, but in the case of a public NAT gateway, the internet gateway then maps the private IPv4 address of the public NAT Gateway to the Elastic IP address associated with the NAT Gateway. When sending response traffic to the instances, whether it's a public or private NAT gateway, the NAT gateway translates the address back to the original source IP address.

Important

You can use either a public or private NAT gateway to route traffic to transit gateways and virtual private gateways.

If you use a private NAT gateway to connect to a transit gateway or virtual private gateway, traffic to the destination will come from the private IP address of the private NAT gateway.

If you use a public NAT gateway to connect to a transit gateway or virtual private gateway, traffic to the destination will come from the private IP address of the public NAT gateway unless you use an internet gateway. The public NAT gateway will only use its EIP as the source IP address when used in conjunction with an internet gateway.

NAT gateway basics

Each NAT gateway is created in a specific Availability Zone and implemented with redundancy in that zone. There is a quota on the number of NAT gateways that you can create in each Availability Zone. For more information, see Amazon VPC quotas.

If you have resources in multiple Availability Zones and they share one NAT gateway, and if the NAT gateway’s Availability Zone is down, resources in the other Availability Zones lose internet access. To improve resiliency, create a NAT gateway in each Availability Zone, and configure your routing to ensure that resources use the NAT gateway in the same Availability Zone.

The following characteristics and rules apply to NAT gateways:

  • A NAT gateway supports the following protocols: TCP, UDP, and ICMP.

  • NAT gateways are supported for IPv4 or IPv6 traffic. For IPv6 traffic, NAT gateway performs NAT64. By using this in conjunction with DNS64 (available on Route 53 resolver), your IPv6 workloads in a subnet in Amazon VPC can communicate with IPv4 resources. These IPv4 services may be present in the same VPC (in a separate subnet) or a different VPC, on your on-premises environment or on the internet.

  • A NAT gateway supports 5 Gbps of bandwidth and automatically scales up to 100 Gbps. If you require more bandwidth, you can split your resources into multiple subnets and create a NAT gateway in each subnet.

  • A NAT gateway can process one million packets per second and automatically scales up to ten million packets per second. Beyond this limit, a NAT gateway will drop packets. To prevent packet loss, split your resources into multiple subnets and create a separate NAT gateway for each subnet.

  • Each IPv4 address can support up to 55,000 simultaneous connections to each unique destination. A unique destination is identified by a unique combination of destination IP address, the destination port, and protocol (TCP/UDP/ICMP). You can increase this limit by associating up to 8 IPv4 addresses to your NAT Gateways (1 primary IPv4 address and 7 secondary IPv4 addresses). You are limited to associating 2 Elastic IP addresses to your public NAT gateway by default. You can increase this limit by requesting a quota adjustment. For more information, see Elastic IP addresses.

  • You can pick the private IPv4 address to assign to the NAT gateway or have it automatically assigned from the IPv4 address range of the subnet. The assigned private IPv4 address persists until you delete the private NAT gateway. You cannot detach the private IPv4 address and you cannot attach additional private IPv4 addresses.

  • You cannot associate a security group with a NAT gateway. You can associate security groups with your instances to control inbound and outbound traffic.

  • You can use a network ACL to control the traffic to and from the subnet for your NAT gateway. NAT gateways use ports 1024–65535. For more information, see Control traffic to subnets using network ACLs.

  • A NAT gateway receives a network interface. You can pick the private IPv4 address to assign to the interface or have it automatically assigned from the IPv4 address range of the subnet. You can view the network interface for the NAT gateway using the Amazon EC2 console. For more information, see Viewing details about a network interface. You cannot modify the attributes of this network interface.

  • You can't route traffic to a NAT gateway through a VPC peering connection. You can't route traffic through a NAT Gateway when traffic arrives over a hybrid connection (Site to Site VPN or Direct Connect) through a Virtual Private Gateway. You can route traffic through a NAT Gateway when traffic arrives over a hybrid connection (Site to Site VPN or Direct Connect) through a transit gateway.

  • NAT gateways support traffic with a maximum transmission unit (MTU) of 8500, but it's important to note the following:

    • To prevent potential packet loss when communicating with resources over the internet using a public NAT gateway, the MTU setting for your EC2 instances should not exceed 1500 bytes. For more information about checking and setting the MTU on an instance, see Check and set the MTU on your Linux instance in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.

    • NAT gateways support Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) via FRAG_NEEDED ICMPv4 packets and Packet Too Big (PTB) ICMPv6 packets.

    • NAT gateways enforce Maximum Segment Size (MSS) clamping for all packets. For more information, see RFC879.

Control the use of NAT gateways

By default, users do not have permission to work with NAT gateways. You can create an IAM role with a policy attached that grants users permissions to create, describe, and delete NAT gateways. For more information, see Identity and access management for Amazon VPC.

Work with NAT gateways

You can use the Amazon VPC console to create and manage your NAT gateways.

Create a NAT gateway

Use the following procedure to create a NAT gateway.

Related quotas
  • You won't be able to create a public NAT gateway if you've exhausted the number of EIPs allocated to your account. For more information on EIP quotas and how to adjust them, see Elastic IP addresses.

  • You can assign up to 8 private IPv4 addresses to your private NAT Gateway. This limit is not adjustable.

  • You are limited to associating 2 Elastic IP addresses to your public NAT gateway by default. You can increase this limit by requesting a quota adjustment. For more information, see Elastic IP addresses.

To create a NAT gateway
  1. Open the Amazon VPC console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose NAT gateways.

  3. Choose Create NAT gateway.

  4. (Optional) Specify a name for the NAT gateway. This creates a tag where the key is Name and the value is the name that you specify.

  5. Select the subnet in which to create the NAT gateway.

  6. For Connectivity type, leave the default Public selection to create a public NAT gateway or choose Private to create a private NAT gateway. For more information about the difference between a public and private NAT gateway, see NAT gateways.

  7. If you chose Public, do the following; otherwise, skip to step 8:

    1. Choose an Elastic IP allocation ID to assign an EIP to the NAT gateway or choose Allocate Elastic IP to automatically allocate an EIP for the public NAT gateway. You are limited to associating 2 Elastic IP addresses to your public NAT gateway by default. You can increase this limit by requesting a quota adjustment. For more information, see Elastic IP addresses.

      Important

      When you assign an EIP to a public NAT gateway, the network border group of the EIP must match the network border group of the Availability Zone (AZ) that you're launching the public NAT gateway into. If it's not the same, the NAT gateway will fail to launch. You can see the network border group for the subnet's AZ by viewing the details of the subnet. Similarly, you can view the network border group of an EIP by viewing the details of the EIP address. For more information about network border groups and EIPs, see Allocate an Elastic IP address.

    2. (Optional) Choose Additional settings and, under Private IP address - optional, enter a private IPv4 address for the NAT gateway. If you don't enter an address, AWS will automatically assign a private IPv4 address to your NAT gateway at random from the subnet that your NAT gateway is in.

    3. Skip to step 11.

  8. If you chose Private, for Additional settings, Private IPv4 address assigning method, choose one of the following:

    • Auto-assign: AWS chooses the primary private IPv4 address for the NAT gateway. For Number of auto-assigned private IPv4 addresses, you can optionally specify the number of secondary private IPv4 addresses for the NAT gateway. AWS chooses these IP addresses at random from the subnet for your NAT gateway.

    • Custom: For Primary private IPv4 address, choose the primary private IPv4 address for the NAT gateway. For Secondary private IPv4 addresses, you can optionally specify up to 7 secondary private IPv4 addresses for the NAT gateway.

  9. If you chose Custom in Step 8, skip this step. If you chose Auto-assign, under Number of auto-assigned private IP addresses, choose the number of secondary IPv4 addresses that you want AWS assign to this private NAT gateway. You can choose up to 7 IPv4 addresses.

    Note

    Secondary IPv4 addresses are optional and should be assigned or allocated when your workloads that use a NAT Gateway exceed 55,000 concurrent connections to a single destination (the same destination IP, destination port, and protocol). Secondary IPv4 addresses increase the number of available ports, and therefore they increase the limit on the number of concurrent connections that your workloads can establish using a NAT Gateway.

  10. If you chose Auto-assign in Step 9, skip this step. If you chose Custom, do the following:

    1. Under Primary private IPv4 address, enter a private IPv4 address.

    2. Under Secondary private IPv4 address, enter up to 7 secondary private IPv4 addresses.

  11. (Optional) To add a tag to the NAT gateway, choose Add new tag and enter the key name and value. You can add up to 50 tags.

  12. Choose Create a NAT gateway.

  13. The initial status of the NAT gateway is Pending. After the status changes to Available, the NAT gateway is ready for you to use. Be sure to update your route tables as needed. For examples, see NAT gateway use cases.

If the status of the NAT gateway changes to Failed, there was an error during creation. For more information, see NAT gateway creation fails.

Edit secondary IP address associations

Each IPv4 address can support up to 55,000 simultaneous connections to each unique destination. A unique destination is identified by a unique combination of destination IP address, the destination port, and protocol (TCP/UDP/ICMP). You can increase this limit by associating up to 8 IPv4 addresses to your NAT Gateways (1 primary IPv4 address and 7 secondary IPv4 addresses). You are limited to associating 2 Elastic IP addresses to your public NAT gateway by default. You can increase this limit by requesting a quota adjustment. For more information, see Elastic IP addresses.

You can use the NAT gateway CloudWatch metrics ErrorPortAllocation and PacketsDropCount to determine if your NAT gateway is generating port allocation errors or dropping packets. To resolve this issue, add secondary IPv4 addresses to your NAT gateway.

Considerations
  • You can add secondary private IPv4 addresses when you create a private NAT gateway or after you create the NAT gateway using the procedure in this section. You can add secondary EIP addresses to public NAT gateways only after you create the NAT gateway by using the procedure in this section.

  • Your NAT gateway can have up to 8 IPv4 addresses associated with it (1 primary IPv4 address and 7 secondary IPv4 addresses). You can assign up to 8 private IPv4 addresses to your private NAT Gateway. You are limited to associating 2 Elastic IP addresses to your public NAT gateway by default. You can increase this limit by requesting a quota adjustment. For more information, see Elastic IP addresses.

To edit secondary IPv4 address associations
  1. Open the Amazon VPC console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose NAT gateways.

  3. Select the NAT gateway whose secondary IPv4 address associations you want to edit.

  4. Choose Actions, and then choose Edit secondary IP address associations.

  5. If you are editing the secondary IPv4 address associations of a private NAT gateway, under Action, choose Assign new IPv4 addresses or Unassign existing IPv4 addresses. If you are editing the secondary IPv4 address associations of a public NAT gateway, under Action, choose Associate new IPv4 addresses or Disassociate existing IPv4 addresses.

  6. Do one of the following:

    • If you chose to assign or associate new IPv4 addresses, do the following:

      1. This step is required. You must select a private IPv4 address. Choose the Private IPv4 address assigning method:

        • Auto-assign: AWS automatically chooses a primary private IPv4 address and you choose if you want AWS to assign up to 7 secondary private IPv4 addresses to assign to the NAT gateway. AWS automatically chooses and assigns them for you at random from the subnet that your NAT gateway is in.

        • Custom: Choose the primary private IPv4 address and up to 7 secondary private IPv4 addresses to assign to the NAT gateway.

      2. Under Elastic IP allocation ID, choose an EIP to add as a secondary IPv4 address. This step is required. You must select an EIP along with a private IPv4 address. If you chose Custom for the Private IP address assigning method, you also must enter a private IPv4 address for each EIP that you add.

        Important

        When you assign a secondary EIP to a public NAT gateway, the network border group of the EIP must match the network border group of the Availability Zone (AZ) that the public NAT gateway is in. If it's not the same, the EIP will fail to assign. You can see the network border group for the subnet's AZ by viewing the details of the subnet. Similarly, you can view the network border group of an EIP by viewing the details of the EIP address. For more information about network border groups and EIPs, see Allocate an Elastic IP address.

      Your NAT gateway can have up to 8 IP addresses associated with it. If this is a public NAT gateway, there is a default quota limit for EIPs per Region. For more information, see Elastic IP addresses.

    • If you chose to unassign or disassociate new IPv4 addresses, complete the following:

      1. Under Existing secondary IP address to unassign, select the secondary IP addresses that you want to unassign.

      2. (optional) Under Connection drain duration, enter the maximum amount of time to wait (in seconds) before forcibly releasing the IP addresses if connections are still in progress. If you don't enter a value, the default value is 350 seconds.

  7. Choose Save changes.

If the status of the NAT gateway changes to Failed, there was an error during creation. For more information, see NAT gateway creation fails.

Tag a NAT gateway

You can tag your NAT gateway to help you identify it or categorize it according to your organization's needs. For information about working with tags, see Tagging your Amazon EC2 resources in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.

Cost allocation tags are supported for NAT gateways. Therefore, you can also use tags to organize your AWS bill and reflect your own cost structure. For more information, see Using cost allocation tags in the AWS Billing User Guide. For more information about setting up a cost allocation report with tags, see Monthly cost allocation report in About AWS Account Billing.

To tag a NAT gateway
  1. Open the Amazon VPC console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose NAT Gateways.

  3. Select the NAT gateway that you want to tag and choose Actions. Then choose Manage tags.

  4. Choose Add new tag, and define a Key and Value for the tag. You can add up to 50 tags.

  5. Choose Save.

Delete a NAT gateway

If you no longer need a NAT gateway, you can delete it. After you delete a NAT gateway, its entry remains visible in the Amazon VPC console for about an hour, after which it's automatically removed. You cannot remove this entry yourself.

Deleting a NAT gateway disassociates its Elastic IP address, but does not release the address from your account. If you delete a NAT gateway, the NAT gateway routes remain in a blackhole status until you delete or update the routes.

To delete a NAT gateway
  1. Open the Amazon VPC console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose NAT Gateways.

  3. Select the radio button for the NAT gateway, and then choose Actions, Delete NAT gateway.

  4. When prompted for confirmation, enter delete and then choose Delete.

  5. If you no longer need the Elastic IP address that was associated with a public NAT gateway, we recommend that you release it. For more information, see Release an Elastic IP address.

API and CLI overview

You can perform the tasks described on this page using the command line or API. For more information about the command line interfaces and a list of available API operations, see Working with Amazon VPC.

Assign a private IPv4 address to a private NAT gateway
Associate Elastic IP addresses (EIPs) and private IPv4 addresses with a public NAT gateway
Create a NAT gateway
Delete a NAT gateway
Describe a NAT gateway
Disassociate secondary Elastic IP addresses (EIPs) from a public NAT gateway
Tag a NAT gateway
Unassign secondary IPv4 addresses from a private NAT gateway

Pricing

When you provision a NAT gateway, you are charged for each hour that your NAT gateway is available and each gigabyte of data that it processes. For more information, see Amazon VPC Pricing.

The following strategies can help you reduce the data transfer charges for your NAT gateway:

  • If your AWS resources send or receive a significant volume of traffic across Availability Zones, ensure that the resources are in the same Availability Zone as the NAT gateway. Alternatively, create a NAT gateway in each Availability Zone with resources.

  • If most traffic through your NAT gateway is to AWS services that support interface endpoints or gateway endpoints, consider creating an interface endpoint or gateway endpoint for these services. For more information about the potential cost savings, see AWS PrivateLink pricing.