AWS Begins Charging for Public IPv4 Addresses | Hacker News Reader

AWS Begins Charging for Public IPv4 Addresses

lastweekinaws.com

82 pointswmf36 comments

$0.005 per hour per IP.

Assuming AWS has 50% utilization on IPs they've assigned for EC2, this is a $1.28 billion/yr fee they created.

Scale is fun.

Jeff will be able to commission another sculpture for his yacht.

That’s also assuming that adding the fee with 6 months of notice won’t make people reduce their IP address usage to avoid the fee.

Extra scandalous too since stuff like load balancers will use a bunch of IPv4 addresses that they can now charge extra for, with no way to avoid the fees since you can't turn off IPv4.

$0.005 per hour per IP, or $43.8 per year, is expensive. Too expensive.

Yes, AWS is buying IPs for ~$50 so either they're only expecting IPv4 to last for 2-3 years (not) or this charge is basically a penalty for people who are bad at networking.

what is a stupidity tax

Fortunately, using private IPs behind a NAT Gateway is cheap /s

Even for people good at networking but using managed services, public IPs on instance can make sense. IPv6 support also has its own set of issues.

> penalty for people who are bad at networking

You mean customers? I can't access IPv6-only websites because my ISP doesn't support it. Oh, and I have the best ISP in the area but none of the ISPs here have IPv6 support.

If you mean routing multiple servers through one that uses IPv4 so you only have to pay for 1 machine then yeah, I guess I'm bad at networking, that does not sound like something I want to maintain.

routing multiple servers through one that uses IPv4 so you only have to pay for 1 machine

This is called a NAT gateway and it's AWS networking 101. If you're not willing to learn how to use AWS then you're going to get ripped off.

Having looked at the pricing for a nat gateway device on aws for some lambda related networking woes recently... You're getting ripped off still unless you handroll or ansible playbook your own nat gateway.

Nat gateways really only hurt if you have fairly high traffic iirc. AWS always dings you on egress traffic in general.

In that case this may be preferable: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/VPC_NAT_Ins...

NAT gateways were the ripoff before this change :) AWS NAT could be described as paying AWS to give yourself a worse networking experience. which I guess is probably why they've made this change. NAT gateway is very similar to assigning a public IP to your instance except that when you use the NAT gateway you don't have 1:1 private to public ip addresses. AWS public IP is just 1:1 NAT. If you don't want any incoming connections with the public IP then you just don't allow incoming connections in the security groups rules and it's almost identical to AWS NAT. AWS NAT was mostly a disadvantage except if you want to originate traffic from a fixed set of ip addresses and you don't have your own public ip range to allocate from. Of course now with the pricing changes it should be cheaper to use AWS NAT over public IP.

I guarantee your company spent more than that in the past few business days on people talking about the weather while waiting for other people to show up on zoom.

What does that have to do with anything? That doesn't suddenly make the expense go away.

For reference: I pay roughly $24/year at my colo and that (I thought) is expensive. I had another host which only charged $6.50/year

Kind of blown away that IPs were still free on AWS.

I'm using mostly Google Cloud and Azure the past few years and as the article mentions, they already charge for IPs.

Official post/discussion over here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36910855

Would it be realistic today to make a commercial website only available on an IPv6 address? Or would the website lose too much traffic because of that?

Not in the UK. Most cheap residential BB is v4 only.

Google publishes a map of what percentage of users are accessing them via IPV6.[1]. The numbers aren't great. The US is around 53%, UK 43%, Brazil 45%, France 74%, India 68%. And many countries much lower. I believe the setup is such that if the end user's IPV6 was functional, they get counted.

[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

Thank you for the statistics, they are interesting. Would also be interesting to know the evolution of those statistics over the last 5 years.

Either way, seems that an IPv4 address is still needed for websites that target a worldwide audience.

There is an "adoption" tab that shows history for the overall percentage, and it has grown significantly.

I think, though, that most of the growth is mobile devices, which seem to more broadly support ipv6 because they have to. If they would show growth for Home/ISP, I suspect it would be pretty lousy.

Right. Why did I not see that? Thanks!

Why would it lose traffic? Even Windows Vista knew how to talk to IPv6.

Can't talk it to the server if the ISP between you and the server refuses to talk it.

Because, unfortunately, not everyone has working IPv6 transit. There are still a nontrivial number of ISPs (especially smaller ones) which don't provide IPv6, and residential network hardware like wireless routers which don't support it.

I guess this is currently then the biggest issue with IPv6 adoption: ISPs are not yet ready for it.

You could do that but also get an ipv4-enabled cdn. If your website is big enough it would require a cdn anyway, and the cdn provider most likely supports ipv6 origins

If you use Cloudflare's tunnel (or similar), you don't even need a publicly routable address.

Wow, $43 per year, that's not cheap! It's likely the price AWS pays to acquire a single new IP at the current market price.

Three years ago, they had about just over 100 Million IPv4 addresses, which at the estimated market price back then, would have been worth ~$2.5 billion worth of IPv4 addresses! https://toonk.io/aws-and-their-billions-in-ipv4-addresses/in...

AWS has been the most active buyer of IPv4 addresses over the last few years, so it's probably quite a bit more now. And in the AWS blog they mentioned "the cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years. "

Should have bought some IPv4 in 2014 or so, would have been a great investment. Back then it was about $11 or so per IP.

If you allocate an AWS instance without any public IPv4 address, does that mean that it won't be able to access sites on the IPv4 only internet?

You can put it behind a NAT Gateway, but that also needs a public IP, and also is very expensive.

I am surprised it took this long.

I wonder if I could resell the attractive numbers.

I have been sitting* on a total of 2 /24s for 10 years waiting to recoup my money.

If I could rent out my ip space at $50/ip/year I’ve made all of my money back plus profit in a single year

*by sitting I mean using them for projects but nothing mission critical

Check out auctions.ipv4.global website you can sell your /24's or buy others. I have used them before successfully.

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