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Why NAT Gateway Matters in Enterprise Architectures.

Unlike basic SNAT via load balancers or default Internet routing, Azure NAT Gateway:

• Preserves source IP across outbound flows


• Scales automatically for high-volume connections


• Supports static public IP or IP prefix assignment


• Works seamlessly with Azure Virtual Network routing

It’s a preferred method to ensure that your applications, containers, or backend workloads always egress with the same public IP address—crucial for firewall rules, allow lists, and compliance tracking.

Azure NAT Gateway Is a Zonal Resource (Today)

A key architectural point to understand: NAT Gateway is currently a zonal service. This means:

• When you create a NAT Gateway and associate it with a subnet, the outbound flows are only resilient within that single zone.


• If your workloads span multiple availability zones, and you only deploy one NAT Gateway in a single zone, traffic from other zones may fail during zone outages.


• Associating a NAT Gateway with a subnet does not guarantee zone redundancy, even if the subnet contains resources across zones.

Resilient Design: One NAT Gateway per Zone

A key architectural point to understand: NAT Gateway is currently a zonal service. This means:

• When you create a NAT Gateway and associate it with a subnet, the outbound flows are only resilient within that single zone.


• If your workloads span multiple availability zones, and you only deploy one NAT Gateway in a single zone, traffic from other zones may fail during zone outages.


• Associating a NAT Gateway with a subnet does not guarantee zone redundancy, even if the subnet contains resources across zones.

Ref Article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/nat-gateway/nat-overview

Future Roadmap: NAT Gateway Standard V2

To simplify deployment and enable zone-redundancy natively, Microsoft will release Gateway Standard V2 sometime in July 2025.

Benefits of NAT Gateway V2:

• Zone-redundant deployment: One NAT Gateway spans multiple zones.


• No need for per-zone subnet association.


• Simplified architecture and better fault tolerance.

This will be especially helpful in scenarios like:

• AKS clusters with multi-zone node pools


• Stateless services deployed with zone redundancy


• Large-scale microservices architectures requiring resilient outbound flows

Key Considerations for Today

Until NAT Gateway Standard V2 is generally available, consider the following when designing outbound connectivity: