Note that this is only important if your use-case requires your servers to have constant, direct 'phone out' access. If you're using ELBs or similar as your lin

Note that this is only important if your use-case requires your servers to have constant, direct 'phone out' access. If you're using ELBs or similar as your link to the outside world for your use-case, a NAT isn't really necessary for constant access. We use a single micro NAT in each VPC, which is only used for system updates (no, I don't have a package cache yet...) and for when we're manually in the server troubleshooting. If there's an outage, well, there's not much we can do in that case, and the NAT isn't needed for production use. And if we really need that NAT back up, just spin up another one and modify the VPC. As you say, it's not strictly needed. It really depends on your use case. If your use-case suffers for the NAT being down, then you need HA on it. If it can wait, then no. With the new managed NAT in AWS, you may as well go with that if you need HA - it's cheapest is roughly twice the price of a micro anyway, and it's one less bit of clutter in your instance list.