Amazon Web Services to Charge for IPv4 Addresses Amidst Rising Costs and Scarcity; Urges Shift to IPv6

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Amazon Web Services to Charge for IPv4 Addresses Amidst Rising Costs and Scarcity; Urges Shift to IPv6

By CircleID Reporter
July 31, 2023, 7:35 am PDT Views: 5,246 Add Comment

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will charge customers for public IPv4 addresses effective February 1, 2024. The charge will be $0.005 per IP per hour for all public IPv4 addresses, irrespective of whether they’re attached to a service. This includes addresses allocated in a user’s account but not connected to an EC2 instance, which already incurs a charge.

This decision by AWS stems from the rapidly increasing scarcity of IPv4 addresses, which has led to a dramatic surge in acquisition cost—over 300% in the past five years. This new pricing reflects the rising costs borne by AWS and aims to incentivize users to manage their usage of public IPv4 addresses judiciously and transition towards IPv6.

The company’s Chief Evangelist, Jeff Barr, strongly encouraged users to speed up their adoption of IPv6, highlighting its efficiency as a modernization and conservation measure. To facilitate this, AWS has provided resources demonstrating how to use IPv6 with popular services such as EC2, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). A blog post has also been published explaining the use of Elastic Load Balancers and NAT Gateways for ingress and egress traffic, eliminating the need for a public IPv4 address for each instance launched.

This move underscores the criticality of IPv6 adoption amidst the dwindling availability of IPv4 addresses, pushing for a more sustainable internet ecosystem.

By CircleID Reporter — CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.
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