fck-nat is a cost-effective alternative to AWS Managed NAT Gateways, offering ARM and x86 AMIs built on Amazon Linux 2023 that support up to 5Gbps NAT traffic on t4g.nano instances at a fraction of the cost. While Managed NAT Gateways are recommended for workloads exceeding 5Gbps bandwidth or requiring five 9s uptime, fck-nat provides a configurable, batteries-included solution for most use cases.
FreeBSD now offers Desktop AMIs for EC2, allowing users to run FreeBSD with graphical desktop environments (KDE, Xfce) via Remote Desktop Protocol, similar to Windows VMs but without OS licensing costs. The announcement includes a tutorial on launching and connecting to these AMIs using AWS CLI commands.