How to minimize VPN gateway costs?

How do you guys go about using the vpn gateway considering you get charged by the hour for it being active?

Ideally I would like to deactivate the gateway when not needed, but I can’t seem to find an option to do so.

Yeah. VPN pricing is not trivial. Even when we did our calculation it was still higher than expected. Lots of traffic happening between domain controllers and their associated network services.

Haven’t really heard of NVA as a resource before, will definitely check it out

Were you referencing the Virtual WAN by any chance? Cause when I look at the pricing of that resource, just the deployment is 7x the cost of the vpngw deployment

Just wondering specifically what appliances you mean? Almost everything I see in us-west-2 is more expensive or BYOL with a much more expensive licensing.

Edit:
Or are you referring more to a pfsense, Foxpass community AMI?

Yep. Put a DC in AZ via VPN as a test and was amazed at how much that actually ended up costing.

Mind giving me a ball park how much running a DC in AZ and using a VPN was costing? I’m eventually going to have to throw one up there so I want to prepare myself with the sticker shock.

First full month of the cheapest VPN gateway and 3 of the cheapest burstable (b-series) VMs ended up being something like $200/mo. It’s not bad if I were a business, but can’t justify that for homelab.

Very well could have been some cost efficiencies that could have been put in place to save money that I didn’t know about though.