Applying NAT at the host level will allow containers to share the host's IP address to access the external network. The traffic from the containers will appear to originate from the host's IP, thus not requiring a public IP for each container. Direct bridge networking would not solve the problem of public IP allocation for each container, Layer 2 bridging with NAT is not a standard approach for container networking, and VLAN tagging is typically used to separate LAN segments and is not directly related to the NAT process.