Episode 12 — NAT Patterns: port forwarding vs PAT and what each solves
NAT shows up in CloudNetX scenarios because it sits at the intersection of addressing, reachability, logging, and security policy, and this episode explains the most common NAT patterns in operational terms. It defines port forwarding as mapping inbound traffic on a specific public address and port to a specific internal service, enabling controlled publishing of internal resources. It defines PAT as translating many internal sessions to a single public address by using different source ports, enabling outbound scale when public addresses are limited. The first paragraph focuses on when each pattern is appropriate, what assumptions each one creates for routing and firewall policy, and how NAT affects identity at the network layer. It also explains why NAT introduces statefulness, making table capacity and timeouts a real availability concern, and why NAT can complicate attribution without strong logging discipline.
