In terms of the system, I love the functionality of a NAT Gateway. For instance, when I was using it, it was easy to refuse certain traffic from penetrating into my other availability zone. I had to use a NAT Gateway to transition traffic only to the desired portal. Due to using Amazon VPC, it was reliable, efficient in operations, and cost-effective. For scalability, it was beneficial when one instance was down in an availability zone, as we had a standby instance. This ensured that when an availability zone in South Africa went down, another one in the US was available. We used methods like backup, restore, and pilot standby to recover data, and AWS Trusted Advisor guided us on cost optimization. We achieved an average of 70% cost reduction through savings plans for reserved instances and Spot Instances for short-term development servers.