Routing through a NAT instance

A NAT instance is a VM with pre-configured routing and IP address translation rules. Technically, it is a regular Ubuntu VM with pre-installed iptables, fully user-configurable. The only difference between a NAT instance and a standard VM is that the former has IP routing pre-enabled and supports connecting multiple network interfaces.

NAT instance images are available on Cloud Marketplace:

• NAT instance powered by Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
• NAT instance powered by Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Yandex Cloud allows you to connect internal VMs to the internet through a NAT instance with static routing. All internal VMs use a single public IP address of the NAT instance.

In this tutorial, you will create a test VM and a NAT one and set up routing using Yandex Compute Cloud and Yandex Virtual Private Cloud, respectively.

You can use one of the following tools to set up NAT routing:

• Management console: Create your infrastructure one step at a time from the Yandex Cloud management console.
• Terraform: Streamline creating and managing your resources using the infrastructure as code (IaC) approach. Download a Terraform configuration example and then deploy the infrastructure using the Yandex Cloud Terraform provider.