Internet Gateway
Does ZopNight manage Internet Gateway?
Internet gateways carry no charge of their own; AWS meters the data transfer flowing through them, not the gateway. ZopNight still inventories every IGW on its 6-hour discovery sweep, because the attachment map shows which of an account's VPCs are internet-facing, and flags gateways attached to abandoned VPCs.
Rules that fire on Internet Gateway
At a glance
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Scheduling notes | discovery and topology context only. |
An internet gateway connects a VPC to the public internet. Gateways are free, but they mark which VPCs are internet-facing and are part of the network inventory needed for a complete environment picture.
A free resource on a metered path
No invoice line ever reads internet gateway. What AWS meters is the traffic that crosses it: data transfer out to the internet bills per GB, while the gateway providing the path costs nothing at any scale. That inversion is worth understanding because it shapes where to look when egress charges spike. The gateway is the fixed, free plumbing, and the cost story is entirely about which resources inside the VPC are pushing bytes through it.
Why ZopNight tracks a no-cost resource
IGWs are discovered through a dedicated provider on the 6-hour cycle and used as topology context rather than as cost items. The attachment map answers a question cost data cannot: which VPCs in the account are internet-facing. That feeds environment mapping, helps explain data-transfer spend by locating the egress boundary, and drives hygiene recommendations for gateways still attached to VPCs that are otherwise abandoned, a signal that an environment was half-decommissioned.
Signals hiding in the attachment map
An IGW attached to a VPC with no running workloads suggests a teardown that stopped partway. A VPC that should be private but carries an attached IGW plus public route table entries is a security posture question as much as a cost one. And an account whose every VPC has its own IGW and NAT path, where a centralized egress design was the intent, points at real, billable duplication one layer down: the NAT gateways, not the IGWs.
Reviewing internet gateways per VPC
The VPC console’s Internet gateways view lists each gateway with its attachment state and VPC. Cross-reference against route tables: a gateway is only live if a route table actually points 0.0.0.0/0 at it. Detached gateways cost nothing but are pure clutter, and deleting them takes seconds.