Managing a NAT Gateway

By default, there is no way that resources hosted in a private subnet can access the internet. NAT is a way to achieve that. However, any resource outside the VPC can't access the resources in a private subnet. We can use a NAT instance or a NAT Gateway to achieve this. However NAT Gateway is a scalable, managed service that does not require any administration. In this section, we will see how to manage a NAT Gateway.

Getting ready

We need to have an AWS account created with a user that has permissions to manage the NAT which we already have. We need to create an Elastic IP to be attached to with NAT, which is provided here. We shall learn details about Elastic IPs in the later sections.

How to do it...

1. Log in to your AWS account and open the VPC Dashboard as shown in the earlier recipe.
2. Click on Elastic IP under the Virtual Private Cloud menu. There are no Elastic IPs as we have not created any till now:

 Elastic IP console

3. Click on Allocate New Address. The following window...