low whistle I imagine they paid a pretty penny for those /12s.
A thought comes to me: If IPv6 adoption continues to drag along, and AWS/Azure/GCP continue to expand their IP blocks like this, how quickly are we in danger of the cloud providers effectively being the Internet?
I've worked in the cloud hosting industry for a decade and a half. The entire time, we were warned about the IPv4 shortage and how we needed to switch to IPv6 soon(tm). Well, things haven't changed. Everyone is dragging their feet on IPv6 adoption from hosting providers, ISPs, hardware manufacturers, and software developers. I predicted this years ago and always said that it would require a government mandate to move on from IPv4.
I honestly believe we are going to ramp up NAT in the coming years before really doing away with IPv4.
I guess there's a large pool of IP addresses used by residential ISPs that could be recycled relatively easily.
When I lived in Ireland I only got a public IPv6, my IPv4 was behind CG-NAT. The nerd in me wasn't a fan of that on paper, but in reality I didn't have any issues with it.
I could see ISPs making a quick buck by switching to CG-NAT on IPv4 so they can sell off their IPv4 blocks.
Those IPs being recycled for servers/services doesn't seem too risky, given that they're not typically hosting anything.
Public auctions (which they didn't use) are currently in the $45-50 per IP ballpark. At that price it's $247.5 million worth of IPs.
At auction the larger networks tend to go for less money per IP since there is a smaller market of people who want and can buy them (you have to be approved by ARIN/RIPE/etc. for the allocation size), which drives the price down.
Of course that is how it will end. Noone thinks that this is a bad idea, to only allow customers of those three to host a service, because that is the current mindset. When they own all the v4 ips, we will have no choice but to hot on their infra or not host at all.
At that time, someone might think that IPv6 with all its faults might have been a good idea after all, but then it will be too late, since "v4 seems to work, all clients behind 2-3-4 layers of NAT, everything tunneled in HTTP/4.5 on a single port outwards to your VPS/VPN".
Not being able to host a game on your home computer, not being able to start a service unless GCP/Azure/AWS allows you to will be the end of the internet as we used to know it. Extra fun for anyone not being american enough to want to be a customer of the big three.
I wonder if we see large use of IPv4 and IPv6 adaptation how tricky it will be to adapt and be able to have enough FIB in boxes to hold all those resolutions I wonder how many companies will go into buying beefy chassis rather than implementing some some low level fragmentation for two families
Having just realized my internet provider, cox, does not actually support ipv6 for the 2 million plus subscribers in my state I think it is safe to say that ipv6 is dead and will never take the place of ipv4 in our lifetimes.
Don't get me wrong. They say they support it, they have lots of PR that says the support it but in fact as a subscriber they do not.
I wish that instead of buying more IPv4 blocks, AWS would drastically lower the price of NAT gateways, then charge extra for EC2 instances and Fargate tasks with public IPs, to make it a no-brainer to stop wasting public IPs. As it stands, it's cheaper to waste public IPs than to use NAT gateways.
Addendum: I also wish I could volunteer to be switched over to CGNAT for my personal IPv4 traffic. This discussion got me thinking about what it would take to get my company's IPv4 footprint down to zero. Might as well do that for myself as well if I could.
It really depends on your needs - I use nano sized SPOT instances for NAT gateways which only cost a penny a month. They in no way compete with the 40gbs capacity and high availability of the hardware NAT devices but if the majority of your traffic is internal, going to a peered VPC, or over IPV6 and you just need a means to make an occasional API call to one of the AWS endpoints that don’t yet support IPV6 (which is the majority of them), then it’s a perfectly viable solution - better then sharing a hardware NAT IMO because you can take advantage of network traffic within the same availability zone being free.
I've been making us use a NAT gateway for all of our EC2 instances since the dawn of time. Only those that need to be directly touched on specific ports get dedicated IPv4. I can count all of our public IPv4 addresses on 1 hand, and that includes a static comcast address for a branch office.
Using auto-assigned IPv4 should not be default, IMO. If I just did what amazon wanted me to without thinking, we would be consuming 5-6x more IPv4 addresses than we otherwise need to.
Regarding NAT gateway pricing (~ $30/month or so iirc) we can use a micro (~ $10/month) Linux instance, it's quite literally about 2 commands (sysctl enable ip forwarding and a masquerade iptables command) or a short script to set it up.
Yep. Or even give me a CG-NAT adoption. I have plenty of use cases where I only use a public IP address in AWS for Internet connectivity without any need for new incoming connections. For those, I'd be totally fine with a CG-NAT address.
Last October, Amazon bought ~4 million addresses by bribing the corrupt technocrats of a radioamateur "non-profit" organization. Fuck Amazon, fuck those corrupt technocrats (like the ICANN/.org team who tried to sell the TLD). It's incredible what this kind of people can get away with.
In the consumer space this doesn't matter much. Most internet users at home could have their IPv4 address removed and only provided an IPv6 one.
Mobile internet is commonly served only by IPv6.
It's the hosting/server space where IPv4 matters and will probably be like this for the next 20 years. This will be harder than the python 2 -> 3 migration. We'll continue to come close to running out of IPv4 addresses but we won't ever ween off them completely in the server space.
> Most internet users at home could have their IPv4 address removed and only provided an IPv6 one.
> Mobile internet is commonly served only by IPv6.
These aren’t true. There are still some big consumer-facing sites that are IPv4 only — notably twitter.com and amazon.com. I can definitely still access both from my mobile device.
Meanwhile, Hetzner just added a staggering $19/address setup fee and a soon doubling of prices for IPv4 addresses from them ostensibly due to the rising costs of getting addresses, yet still has virtually no support for IPv6 on their offerings outside of a /64 per dedicated server.
/64 seems pretty standard, unfortunately. It's what I get on OVH. There's also way worse providers, like Digital Ocean with a /124, and LightSail with /128.
IPv6 will never happen without someone forcing hands of big corps and ISPs to switch to Ipv6.
Imagine all social media and streaming services, disable ipv4 within a month. These are not critical services but still will force ISPs to make the switch.
So part of this is putting into service networks that they previously acquired, probably to keep up with growth. Buying in 2018 would have been a MUCH lower price than today -- and it can pretty much only go up!
Then again, at the height of the times, the registries handed out one /8 per month more or less, so whatever small pockets of (seemingly) unused /8s, or /10s you can find, gives you weeks to delay your ipv6 transition.
Yes, and it may be possible they will be sold[1]. From the article it looks like they're identifying unauthorized use of their space, while clearing the addresses from firewalls to become really routable.
Wow! IPv4 addresses are like oil. We think we've run out, then we get better methods like "fracking" and "shale oil" and we can squeeze out a few more barrels of them.
You want proof that people don't yet trust IPv6? Simply lookup SPF records, very few (like <5%) of domains list IPv6 records in their SPF record, for example Google and Outlook do, but aol.com/yahoo.com do not. Email is a critical service and the fact most people aren't using IPv6 to deliver email yet is a telling sign.
dig -t txt DOMAIN | grep v=spf1
and walk the records and includes for "ip6:...". Good luck finding any.
In my experience working IT at some public universities and some private education facilities there is a negative incentive for adopting IPV6. Often in these environments bandwidth use it up even on the LAN side and dual stack IPv6 simply causes unnecessary traffic that impacts negatively network performance. This was not the case in my experience 7-10 years ago.
Amazon didn’t just buy these addresses, an AWS service was just assigned them due to some future known growth. Amazon bought the rights to use all of the 3/8 network years ago and is just now allocating some additional subnets of that to AWS services.
[+] [-] korethr|4 years ago|reply
A thought comes to me: If IPv6 adoption continues to drag along, and AWS/Azure/GCP continue to expand their IP blocks like this, how quickly are we in danger of the cloud providers effectively being the Internet?
[+] [-] wu_187|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ambroos|4 years ago|reply
When I lived in Ireland I only got a public IPv6, my IPv4 was behind CG-NAT. The nerd in me wasn't a fan of that on paper, but in reality I didn't have any issues with it.
I could see ISPs making a quick buck by switching to CG-NAT on IPv4 so they can sell off their IPv4 blocks.
Those IPs being recycled for servers/services doesn't seem too risky, given that they're not typically hosting anything.
[+] [-] skuhn|4 years ago|reply
At auction the larger networks tend to go for less money per IP since there is a smaller market of people who want and can buy them (you have to be approved by ARIN/RIPE/etc. for the allocation size), which drives the price down.
[+] [-] goodpoint|4 years ago|reply
Between cloudflare and AWS/Azure/Google most of the Internet is an oligopoly right now.
Interesting how nobody else replied to this part of your comment.
[+] [-] Ericson2314|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StreamBright|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IcePic|4 years ago|reply
At that time, someone might think that IPv6 with all its faults might have been a good idea after all, but then it will be too late, since "v4 seems to work, all clients behind 2-3-4 layers of NAT, everything tunneled in HTTP/4.5 on a single port outwards to your VPS/VPN".
Not being able to host a game on your home computer, not being able to start a service unless GCP/Azure/AWS allows you to will be the end of the internet as we used to know it. Extra fun for anyone not being american enough to want to be a customer of the big three.
[+] [-] liveoneggs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koksik202|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hamburgerwah|4 years ago|reply
Don't get me wrong. They say they support it, they have lots of PR that says the support it but in fact as a subscriber they do not.
[+] [-] mwcampbell|4 years ago|reply
Addendum: I also wish I could volunteer to be switched over to CGNAT for my personal IPv4 traffic. This discussion got me thinking about what it would take to get my company's IPv4 footprint down to zero. Might as well do that for myself as well if I could.
[+] [-] wbl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxcvbn4038|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bob1029|4 years ago|reply
Using auto-assigned IPv4 should not be default, IMO. If I just did what amazon wanted me to without thinking, we would be consuming 5-6x more IPv4 addresses than we otherwise need to.
[+] [-] lazyant|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moduspol|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remram|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] southerntofu|4 years ago|reply
Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24753654
[+] [-] nsizx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tedk-42|4 years ago|reply
Mobile internet is commonly served only by IPv6.
It's the hosting/server space where IPv4 matters and will probably be like this for the next 20 years. This will be harder than the python 2 -> 3 migration. We'll continue to come close to running out of IPv4 addresses but we won't ever ween off them completely in the server space.
[+] [-] umanwizard|4 years ago|reply
> Mobile internet is commonly served only by IPv6.
These aren’t true. There are still some big consumer-facing sites that are IPv4 only — notably twitter.com and amazon.com. I can definitely still access both from my mobile device.
[+] [-] techsupporter|4 years ago|reply
https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/ipv4-pricing/
[+] [-] RedShift1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheChaplain|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kolaente|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remram|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bob1029|4 years ago|reply
This is what we need to encourage IPv6 adoption and conservation of existing digital resources.
[+] [-] seligman99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthropodie|4 years ago|reply
Imagine all social media and streaming services, disable ipv4 within a month. These are not critical services but still will force ISPs to make the switch.
[+] [-] jagger27|4 years ago|reply
And there are even some earlier pickups of two /10s: 252.0.0.0/10 and 44.192.0.0/10. Wow.
[+] [-] bushbaba|4 years ago|reply
Gonna be funny how well likely live to see ipv6 run out of ip space leading to ipv8!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
[+] [-] skuhn|4 years ago|reply
So part of this is putting into service networks that they previously acquired, probably to keep up with growth. Buying in 2018 would have been a MUCH lower price than today -- and it can pretty much only go up!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18407173
[+] [-] ccakes|4 years ago|reply
Source: worked for them in a couple of countries
[+] [-] IcePic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|4 years ago|reply
And is 240.0.0.0/4 still "reserved"?
[+] [-] rnhmjoj|4 years ago|reply
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/penta...
[+] [-] fortran77|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kseifried|4 years ago|reply
dig -t txt DOMAIN | grep v=spf1
and walk the records and includes for "ip6:...". Good luck finding any.
[+] [-] jghn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roody15|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oars|4 years ago|reply
It's even been discussed on HN previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18407173
[+] [-] saranagati|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ekaros|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] turminal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] cankut_orakcal|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tom7|4 years ago|reply
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