NAT gateways were the ripoff before this change :) AWS NAT could be described as paying AWS to give yourself a worse networking experience. which I guess is probably why they've made this change. NAT gateway is very similar to assigning a public IP to your instance except that when you use the NAT gateway you don't have 1:1 private to public ip addresses. AWS public IP is just 1:1 NAT. If you don't want any incoming connections with the public IP then you just don't allow incoming connections in the security groups rules and it's almost identical to AWS NAT. AWS NAT was mostly a disadvantage except if you want to originate traffic from a fixed set of ip addresses and you don't have your own public ip range to allocate from. Of course now with the pricing changes it should be cheaper to use AWS NAT over public IP.