30% Cost Reduction with VPC Private Endpoints

Challenge

Production workloads at Nielsen Media were sending significant traffic to Kinesis and Firehose through NAT Gateways. NAT Gateway data processing charges were a growing line item on the infrastructure bill.

Solution

I implemented VPC endpoints for Kinesis and Firehose. This allowed the workloads to reach AWS services over the AWS private network instead of routing through the NAT Gateway.

Implementation Notes

• Endpoints were provisioned via Terraform so the change was reviewable and reproducible.
• Security groups on the endpoints were tightened to only allow traffic from the workload subnets.
• Cost and latency were re-measured post-rollout to confirm the impact.

Outcome

A 30% reduction in overall cloud infrastructure costs, with the added benefit of lower latency and a smaller public-internet attack surface.