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Industry: Advertising Technology (AdTech)
The customer is a global advertising technology company that runs the world's largest independent sell-side advertising platform. Its hybrid-cloud infrastructure helps publishers monetize digital content by connecting them with advertisers and agencies across connected TV, online video, display, audio, and mobile formats. Supporting programmatic advertising transactions at this scale and across multiple regions requires a highly scalable, high-throughput network that spans hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud environments. Here, the network is part of the application, not background infrastructure. The company needs deterministic traffic steering, fast failover, and routing patterns its engineers can automate without building custom control plane tooling.
“We were spending nearly $20,000 per week on AWS NAT gateway, with costs growing 7.5% month over month. TNSR reduced those costs by over 75%, and they no longer increase. Our spend is now predictable without sacrificing growth or performance.”
- Technical Fellow, Engineering
Customer Challenge
- AWS NAT Gateway costs had grown to nearly $20,000 per week
- Networking spend was increasing roughly 7.5% month over month
- Expansion into additional AWS regions would significantly increase costs
- Needed high-throughput NAT without sacrificing performance or control
- Required automation, advanced routing, and high availability
Customer Solution
- Deployed TNSR on AWS as a high-performance NAT and routing platform
- Used primary/standby TNSR pairs across three AWS regions
- Leveraged BGP and BFD for fast failover and resilient connectivity
- Managed configuration through Ansible and Infrastructure as Code
- Worked with Netgate through a 30-day POC before production deployment
Customer Benefits
- Reduced AWS networking costs by more than 75%
- Lowered annual networking spend from over $1M to roughly $250K
- Made cloud networking costs more predictable as traffic scaled
- Expanded into additional regions without a proportional cost increase
- Gained high-performance routing, automation, and greater network control
Challenge: Escalating Cloud NAT Costs and Limited Cost Control
The customer needed to NAT large volumes of outbound traffic from its AWS VPCs to an external data center it owns. AWS NAT Gateway charges for that traffic had reached roughly $20,000 a week and were still rising. On their growth trajectory, NAT Gateway costs alone would exceed $100,000 a month in 2026.
AWS NAT Gateway pricing is based on three components:
- NAT gateway hourly charge - varies by region
- NAT gateway data processing charge - per GBc
- Data transfer charge - charge for data transferred across availability zones
Together, these three components resulted in excessively high ongoing costs. The customer wanted to continue leveraging AWS for its scalability, availability, and operational flexibility, but without sacrificing cost efficiency.
Solution: Enabling scalable, cost-efficient cloud expansion
TNSR software provided the low latency and high processing performance the customer required while delivering a significant cost advantage over AWS NAT Gateway.
In addition to raw performance, TNSR met several key customer requirements:
- BFD and BGP advanced routing and connectivity features
- High Availability (HA) with primary/standby pairs to manage failover
- Enterprise-grade configuration management for complete control
- Integration with AWS infrastructure while managing the entire stack as Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
These capabilities allowed the customer to maintain both cloud agility and cost efficiency, which are essential for their planned expansion into two additional regions.
To support expansion, the customer deployed:
- Primary and standby pairs in each region
- Three separate AWS regions
- A total of six TNSR instances
Cost Efficiency Analysis
TNSR Estimated Daily Cost:
| Component | Unit Cost | Quantity | Daily Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| EC2: c8gn.12xlarge | $2.84/hour | 6 | $409.54 |
| TNSR Pay-As-You-Go License | $2.00/hour | 6 | $288.00 |
| Total | $697.54/day |
(Based on On-Demand Graviton EC2 Pricing in US East - Ohio region)
At $20,000 a week, NAT Gateway spend already exceeded $1,040,000 a year, and it was still climbing month over month. Running six TNSR instances on AWS Graviton EC2, a primary and a standby in each of three regions, costs roughly $250,000 a year. That is a savings of over 75%, more than enough to cover the cost of the expansion. The customer got the scalability it needed without a network bill that grew along with it.
Implementation & Assistance
The customer started with Netgate's Proof of Concept (POC) trial to evaluate its specific scenario: performance, cost savings, and whether TNSR covered its feature requirements. The POC trial provides full access to Netgate software, TNSR, pfSense Plus, or both, at no cost for 30 days.
During the trial, Netgate worked closely with the customer to review its existing network setup and traffic patterns and to confirm that the solution fit its scalability and cost goals. By the end of the trial, TNSR had met or exceeded every requirement.
Netgate then extended a private offer through AWS Marketplace, with custom pricing that locked in long-term savings and simplified procurement.
Because TNSR integrates well with modern automation tooling, the customer now manages configuration with Ansible and the ansible.netcommon.netconf module. Its engineers can safely add or remove networks, update BGP neighbors, and modify NAT rules in seconds instead of making those changes by hand.
TNSR now runs as a fully programmable infrastructure platform: automated, repeatable, and managed as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) from the start.
Key Benefits Delivered by TNSR
- Dramatic Cost Savings
Over 75% savings without compromising performance, while gaining more predictable cloud spend. - Low Latency and High Throughput
TNSR uses FD.io’s Vector Packet Processing (VPP) as its dataplane. VPP is designed for high-performance packet processing and forwarding and can scale well beyond the bandwidth limits imposed by the AWS environment. - High Availability
BGP and BFD support enable seamless, rapid failover in the event of a system failure, leveraging AWS’s native VPC Route Server functionality. - Configuration and Control
TNSR offers versatile management options, including an intuitive CLI and RESTCONF, and NETCONF APIs.
Architectural Diagram
About TNSR
Netgate TNSR is a full-featured, high-performance software router and VPN concentrator, available on Netgate appliances, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. Built on Vector Packet Processing (VPP), TNSR delivers the capabilities expected of a high-end router: IPv4 and IPv6, BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, large-scale NAT, Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF), and Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD). TNSR also provides high-throughput site-to-site and remote access VPNs over IPsec or WireGuard® for edge, cloud, and multi-cloud deployments.
Further Reading
For more information on NAT cost savings with TNSR, please see our recent blog on the power of TNSR as an AWS networking resource: TNSR on AWS: A High-Performance, Cost-Saving NAT gateway Enhancement