A company is hosting its website on AWS within a single VPC, which includes public and private subnets across two Availability Zones. Static content, such as images, is stored in Amazon S3. The website is served by a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances deployed in private subnets, managed by an Auto Scaling group and fronted by an Application Load Balancer. These EC2 instances retrieve content from an S3 bucket to render webpages. The company uses AWS Direct Connect with a public VIF for on-premises connectivity to the S3 bucket.

A network engineer observes that traffic between the EC2 instances and Amazon S3 is routed through a NAT gateway, leading to increased costs as traffic grows. To reduce NAT gateway costs associated with this traffic, what solution should the network engineer implement?