I've run into this kind of snake oil in the cloud, as well. Some organizations demand all routing go through an "upstream" VPC operated by the parent org's IT d

I've run into this kind of snake oil in the cloud, as well. Some organizations demand all routing go through an "upstream" VPC operated by the parent org's IT dept, so various third-party security services (WAFs, IDSes, etc.) can scan / inspect the traffic.