alt Hacker News> so they have to have reasonable pricing that actually reflects their costs instead of charging more than free for basic services like NAT
How is the cost of NAT free?
> Cloud services are actually really nice and convenient if you were to ignore the eye watering cost versus DIY.
I don't doubt clouds are expensive, but in many countries it'd cost more to DIY for a proper business. Running a service isn't just running the install command. Having a team to maintain and monitor services is already expensive.
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salesforce had their hosting bill jump orders of magnitude after ditching their colocation, it did not save anything and colocation staff were replaced with AWS engineers
nat is free to provide because the infrastructure to have NAT is already there and there is never anything maxing out a switch cluster(most switches sit at ~1% usage since they're overspeced $1,000,000 switches), so other than host CPU time managing interrupts (which is unlikely since all network cards offload this).
sure you could argue that regional NAT might should be priced, but these companies have so much fiber between their datacenters that all of nat usage is probably a rounding error.
They said “charging more than free” - i.e., more than $0, i.e., they’re not free. It was awkwardly worded.
Presumably they're talking about the egregious price of NAT on AWS.
It's next to free self hosting considering even the crappiest consumer router has hardware accelerated NAT and takes a tiny amount of power. You likely already have the hardware and power since you need routing and potentially other network services