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Comment by profmonocle | Hacker News Reader

Cloud NAT would be fine except it costs 4.5¢ per GB (in both directions) which could hurt some use cases. If your backend VMs pull in more than 64.8 GB per month from the Internet it's cheaper to just pay for the public IP. (Only applies to outbound connections initiated by the VM, inbound connections through load balancers don't go through the NAT.)

I'll echo what others have said - it sucks that they're doing this before adding IPv6 support. A good portion of traffic could bypass the NAT entirely considering how many services support IPv6 these days.

They don't start charging until April, so maybe they'll surprise us with an IPv6 announcement before then, but I'm not betting on it. :(

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The cloud NAT is not for avoiding ip costs.

Lot of external services need whitelisted IP. And in the world of k8s and on-demand instances, NAT is pretty much the only way one can guarantee static outbound IP.

> The cloud NAT is not for avoiding ip costs.

Well, it wasn't before now, since it's always been more expensive. But they're trying to sell it that way. OP's link doesn't mention it, but the email I got also announced a Cloud NAT price drop.

There's currently a $32.85 flat fee per region to use Cloud NAT (on top of the per-GB fee). They're lowering this to $1.022 per VM per month, capped at $32.12 total. (They're also capping the per-GB fee to 4.5 cents per GB worldwide, it's currently higher in some regions.)

Of course, the flat fee is peanuts for any substantial cloud project, but the fact that they announced them side-by-side means they consider Cloud NAT a way to save on this new IP charge.

Slightly off topic: how does cloud NAT scale. The defaults are way too low for request heavy projects and the regarding docs were kinda hard to understand for a non ops guy.

What defaults are you referring to? Cloud NAT is part of the GCP network fabric and all implemented as software so there's no single point of failure or bottlenecks.

You can always add additional Static IPs to Cloud NAT. The mail they sent doesn't mention any IP cost for Cloud NAT so I assume that it's free.

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