So yes, AWS, GCP, Azure bandwidth pricing is very high. Oracle is, amazingly, the outlier with lower bandwidth pricing.
Are there actual compute resources necessary to make endpoints and nat gateways work?
Regularly see EC2 interzone account for 1/3 of EC2 cost this would be a huge win if so (albeit totally ridiculous).
The reason for the hourly cost is a bit subtler than that, but we are working on the cost of this stuff.
(Source: Work at AWS.)
So that means all external traffic in a private subnet with a NAT Gateway is routed through a single instance? I’ll have to read up more on Hyperplane.
They're not small- these are large, multitenant fleets handling huge numbers of NAT gateways all at once. The system has several layers, that scale on different dimensions and have different requirements. And those "requirements" can be very weird.
The part that actually moves packets around is probably mostly full-size c5n's, for the bandwidth.