97 articles on networking — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
Gateway VPC endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB are completely free, while interface endpoints cost about $0.01 per hour per AZ plus $0.01 per GB. Knowing which services use which endpoint type, and how the fees stack across AZs, keeps PrivateLink affordable. Here is the breakdown.
Traffic between availability zones costs about $0.01 per GB each way, while traffic between regions runs roughly $0.02 per GB or more. Both are easy to trigger accidentally and both compound at scale. Here is how the two taxes differ and how to avoid them.
An Application Load Balancer costs about $0.0225 per hour plus a per-LCU fee, and the LCU is the part that surprises people. It measures four dimensions and bills the highest one. Here is how LCUs work and how to keep them low.
A Network Load Balancer costs about $0.0225 per hour plus a per-NLCU fee, and like the ALB it bills on the highest of several dimensions. For TCP and UDP pass-through it is often cheaper than an ALB. Here is how NLB pricing works.
Route 53 health checks cost $0.50 per month for AWS endpoints and $0.75 for external ones, with optional features adding $1 to $2 each. On their own they are cheap, but dozens of them with add-ons quietly add up. Here is the pricing.
Transit Gateway inter-region peering lets you link regions through the AWS backbone, but you pay per-GB data processing on each side plus cross-region data transfer. For high-volume inter-region traffic the fees stack. Here is the cost breakdown.
Direct Connect adds port fees but slashes data transfer out to about $0.02 per GB versus $0.09 over the internet. For heavy, steady egress to your data center the savings can dwarf the port cost. Here is the break-even math.
Global Accelerator charges a fixed $0.025 per hour plus a per-GB premium, while CloudFront has no fixed fee and bills per GB and per request. They solve different problems, and picking the wrong one wastes money. Here is the cost comparison.
VPC Flow Logs are free to enable, but you pay to deliver them: about $0.50 per GB to CloudWatch Logs or less to S3. On a busy VPC that ingestion cost can surprise you. Here is how flow log pricing actually works.
AWS now charges about $0.005 per hour for every public IPv4 address, in use or idle, adding roughly $3.65 per month per address. For fleets with hundreds of public IPs the total is real. Here is how the charge works and how to cut it.
Traffic between resources over private IPs in the same AZ is free, but the same traffic over public or Elastic IPs is charged even within a region. Using the wrong address turns free traffic into a per-GB bill. Here is how to keep it free.
Application Gateway v2 bills a fixed hourly fee plus capacity units that scale with traffic, and the WAF-enabled SKU costs noticeably more. Here is how the pricing works and when a simpler load balancer is cheaper.
Moving data between Google Cloud regions is billed per gigabyte, with rates that depend on whether the regions are on the same continent or across the world. Here is how inter-region egress is priced and how to design around it.
Serving files straight from S3 or a load balancer charges full egress rates on every byte; a CDN caches content at the edge, cutting origin egress and often charging less per GB. The break-even depends on cache hit ratio and traffic. Here is the math.
Data egress (traffic leaving AWS to the internet, and between regions and AZs) is one of the most surprising and controllable line items. This checklist walks through the highest-impact ways to cut it, from CDN caching to architecture.
A NAT gateway costs about 32 to 45 dollars a month plus per-GB processing, and the naive high-availability setup runs one per availability zone. Knowing when you need that redundancy and when one gateway is fine saves real money. Here is the tradeoff.
Traffic between availability zones inside the same region is not free. At roughly a cent per GB in each direction, cross-AZ transfer quietly adds up for chatty microservices, replicated databases, and Kafka clusters. Here is how it is billed and how to cut it.
Route 53 charges per hosted zone, per million queries, and for health checks, so DNS cost is usually small but can surprise you at high query volume or with many zones and health checks. Here is the full pricing picture.
us-east-1 and us-west-2 are two of AWS's cheapest and most feature-complete regions, with pricing that is close but not identical. Here is how they compare on cost, and what else to weigh beyond the sticker price.
VPC peering is free to set up and charges only for data transfer; Transit Gateway adds hourly attachment and per-GB processing fees but scales connectivity cleanly. Which is cheaper depends on how many VPCs you connect. Here is the detailed comparison.
AWS WAF bills per web ACL, per rule, and per million requests inspected, so cost scales with how many rules you run and how much traffic you protect. Here is how WAF pricing works and how to keep protection affordable.
AWS security groups are free, there is no charge for creating or using them. But the network resources they protect, and adjacent features like WAF and Network Firewall, do cost money. Here is what is free and what is not.
Some cloud data transfers are free (inbound, same-AZ private traffic) and some are expensive (egress to the internet, cross-region, cross-AZ). Knowing which is which is essential to avoiding surprise bills. Here is the map.
A content delivery network bills mostly for data transfer out and requests, and the rates vary by provider and region. Here is how CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN, and Azure CDN compare, and how to keep CDN cost predictable.