Mark Robinson

Staff Infrastructure Engineer

Plaid

Roadblock Title:

Designing a NAT-Free Architecture: Lessons from Rebuilding Our Egress Layer

Time:

Wednesday - 11:30 AM (Windows)

Abstract:

If you’re a modern SaaS company, you are almost certainly hosting in one of the hyperscalers. This means you are using load balancers and NAT gateways hosted on AWS’ IP range. The result: huge NAT bills, opaque rate limits no one can easily debug, and complaints from security partners about “traffic from AWS”.

At Plaid, we decided to flip the script and build a NAT-free data access architecture. We started at the bottom by bringing IP ownership in house, and replaced AWS features with in-house systems designed to support Plaid’s needs first. This single decision changed the shape of our network: lower egress cost, better control over IP reputation, and a much cleaner story when working with our partners and customers.

Bio:

Mark is a passionate engineer who loves to solve hard problems. He is an infrastructure engineer at Plaid, a financial data network, where he works at solving scaling issues around deploying software, and keeping the infrastructure running. He specifically enjoys focusing on CICD pipelines, metrics and monitoring, and developer optimization.

In his spare time, Mark rehabilitates under-socialized kittens, renovates his heritage house, and makes Jeff Bezos cry by reducing AWS spend.