No issues to speak of so far. Our app databases are in the VPC itself so our own traffic does not get routed through the NAT gateway but I haven't heard any iss

No issues to speak of so far. Our app databases are in the VPC itself so our own traffic does not get routed through the NAT gateway but I haven't heard any issues from users either. At the moment we're using an m1.small for the NAT itself though if you have perf issues you can bump that up as well. I would guess a c1.medium would be more appropriate though as I said we haven't had any issues so haven't considered changing anything yet. Here's a speed test through from a m1.small through the NAT (27.5 MB/s): $ curl -o /dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 500M 100 500M 0 0 27.5M 0 0:00:18 0:00:18 --:--:-- 29.2M Here's a speed test from a m1.small vanilla EC2 instance outside the NAT (38.2 MB/s): $ curl -o /dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 500M 100 500M 0 0 38.2M 0 0:00:13 0:00:13 --:--:-- 34.1M