Question

A media company runs a fleet of EC2 instances in private subnets that process thousands of files stored in Amazon S3 in the same Region. All S3 traffic currently routes through NAT gateways, and the finance team has flagged that NAT gateway data processing charges have become one of the largest line items in the monthly bill. The workload transfers tens of terabytes to and from S3 daily. Which change most effectively reduces cost while maintaining security and requiring the least ongoing operational effort?

Accepted Answer

Deploy a VPC gateway endpoint for Amazon S3 and update the private subnet route tables so S3 traffic bypasses the NAT gateways.

Answer

Replace the NAT gateways with self-managed NAT instances on Graviton EC2 to lower the per-GB data processing rate.

Answer

Create an S3 interface endpoint (AWS PrivateLink) in each private subnet and route S3 requests through the elastic network interfaces.

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the buckets and point the EC2 instances at the accelerated endpoint to avoid NAT charges.