Outbound Internet Connectivity for VMs on Azure: Virtual Network (with Default Config) vs NAT Gateway

I'm running some VMs on Azure inside of a Virtual Network that I manually configured. For the most part, these VMs just run unattended and if I ever need remote access to them, I just assign a public IP address and log in via RDP.

I was looking into configuring outbound internet access for these VMs and I quickly realised that this is supported by default with Azure Virtual Networks (with the default Gateway being the first IP address associated with the subnet).

When I first started to research how to enable outbound internet connectivity for these VMs, my initial research led me to a solution of adding a NAT Gateway to the Virtual Network. In my case, I don't have any functional requirement for all my VMs to share the same public IP address so I'm happy to use the default configuration of the Virtual Network (it's simpler - and requires no configuration) - however, I'm curious, is there any advantage to using a NAT Gateway for outbound internet access vs using the default configuration of Virtual Networks on Azure?

Solution 1:

A outbound NAT gateway in Azure exists purely to resolve the issue of having a static outbound IP for all resources in a vNet. If you don't need that, then it doesn't provide you any benefit.