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AWS to begin charging for public IPv4 addresses

443 points| realshadow | 2 years ago |aws.amazon.com

363 comments

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[+] amluto|2 years ago|reply
> A new blog post shows you how to use Elastic Load Balancers and NAT Gateways for ingress and egress traffic, while avoiding the use of a public IPv4 address for each instance that you launch.

It would be nice if this came with reasonably priced NAT gateways. The current pricing is outrageous.

[+] alberth|2 years ago|reply
This was expected, and rent seeking.

AWS over the last decade has spent $ billions buying up ASN blocks.

I've never been one to use the word "rent seeking", but owning IPs is the ultimate rent seeking cloud business. Domain names can change registries but if you own the underlining IP being used (and there's a depleting supply of them) - it's a great business to charge rents on.

https://www.techradar.com/news/amazon-has-hoarded-billions-o...

[+] wongarsu|2 years ago|reply
This finally puts real pressure on software and services to work on IPv6 only. I wouldn't be surprised if within 1-2 release cycles lots of distributions suddenly update just fine with just IPv6, package mangers can download packages over IPv6, lots of APIs gain solid and well-tested IPv6 support, etc.
[+] candiddevmike|2 years ago|reply
Businesses and organizations are holding IPv6 back, not consumers. No one I talk to is prioritizing IPv6 migrations or spending money to upgrade gear that will support it. Maybe some net new stuff might get it, but for most businesses IPv4 is and will be the default, simply because they can't be bothered to do something different.
[+] kccqzy|2 years ago|reply
Apple has been demanding apps support IPv6 only for years now. They reject your app if it fails under NAT64. The end user side is mostly a solved problem.
[+] Macha|2 years ago|reply
As a business... $40/year/server is nothing.

As a individual/hobbyist, it's a much bigger disincentive.

For students and the like, it might actually be prohibitive.

The problem is it's really the first group that needs to drive the remaining IPv6 adoption by replacing their middleware boxes etc. and they're the group who are unlikely to care at this price.

[+] wiredfool|2 years ago|reply
For a while, google was blocking linode's ipv6 block in Frankfurt.

NBD, except that elastic hosts their client deb repos on google infra, so apt-get update was failing from it.

The solution was to single stack the server, or manually install the clients having downloaded from elsewhere.

[+] NoZebra120vClip|2 years ago|reply
TIL that my Chromebook connects to the Internet with a 6to4 address rather than the real /64 that my ISP assigns.
[+] sph|2 years ago|reply
Yearly reminder that HN is still IPv4-only
[+] wmf|2 years ago|reply
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36910855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36910994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36942424
[+] decasia|2 years ago|reply
So I have a tiny personal website hosted on ec2. Right now the DNS points to the server's public IPv4 address. But I don't really want to pay $40+/year for an IPv4 for my personal project.

Does anyone have experience switching a small personal site to IPv6 only in 2023?

I'm guessing the vast majority of my (North American/European-based) friends and visitors can probably connect just fine to an IPv6 address. I wish I knew what percentage it is.

I guess I could add an AAAA record and check what percentage of traffic actually uses it.

[+] capableweb|2 years ago|reply
According to Google (https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html), 60% of word-wide users wouldn't be able to visit your website.

In the US, it would be about ~50% of users, while in Europe it's ranging from 30% (France) to 98% (Spain) who wouldn't be able to visit the website.

But yeah, I'd do what you say in the bottom of your comment. Add AAAA records and then see how many people uses ipv6 compared to ipv4 and then decide.

[+] red_trumpet|2 years ago|reply
That's a high price tag! On my Hetzner instance I pay 0.5€ per month and IPv4 adress, so 6€ per year.
[+] drbscl|2 years ago|reply
> tiny personal website

I'd recommend just migrating to cloudflare pages or github pages; they're both free

[+] avereveard|2 years ago|reply
How about removing the public IP and receiving connection from cloudfront? Or have it hosted in apprunner. Then you cname your domain to the services' domain, and skip the cost.
[+] pfych|2 years ago|reply
Throwing the VPC behind cloudfront is probably the best course of action, if your site is static I'd recommend looking into S3 + Cloudfront for hosting it. It's basically free, and great if your site is mostly static. I run a few scheduled jobs on Lambda to pull some data for my site and it comes out at basically $0 every month.
[+] webworker|2 years ago|reply
EC2 stack is overpriced for small and hobby websites. Lightsail is far more appropriately priced.
[+] ThatPlayer|2 years ago|reply
Cloudflare's gateway supports IPv6 and will serve over IPv4 if you want to use that.
[+] Saris|2 years ago|reply
Why not switch to a different provider? AWS is really pricey for what you get
[+] cferry|2 years ago|reply
The only barrier for me to go IPv6-only is those VPS that are provided with a single /128 IPv6, and I do not know of a service that would offer IPv6 tunneling other than HE, that requires an IPv4 endpoint. The day I get a full /48 or /64 with my VPSes, I'm ready to drop IPv4.
[+] londons_explore|2 years ago|reply
As long as IPv6 remains free, and there is some kind of ipv4 accessible proxy for web stuff for free, I'm happy.
[+] ArchOversight|2 years ago|reply
> ipv4 accessible proxy for web stuff for free

Not within AWS.

[+] mnutt|2 years ago|reply
I don't see where the latter is the case? For that I believe regular NAT gateway bandwidth charges apply?
[+] MagicMoonlight|2 years ago|reply
I still don't get why we can't just expand IPv4 into IPv5 by adding some new blocks to the front.

So instead of 192.0.0.1 it becomes 0.0.0.0.192.0.0.1

All existing addresses work, you simply append zeroes to any address which is too short for the new standard. Any old timey software still works as long as you use a router between the two systems with an old timey address.

This would give us as many addresses as we want without any changes or downsides. So why no do?

[+] doomjunky|2 years ago|reply
IP is not a text format (like HTTP). It's a binary format where each field of the IPv4 header has an exactly defined offset and length. The source IP address is placed at offset 96 and has a length of 32 bit, the destination IP address sits right afterwards with the same length. Changing anything will result in new protocol definition, et voilà that's IPv6.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol_version_4#He...

[+] hnarn|2 years ago|reply
This comment is just HN at its best. Chef's kiss. The Internet Engineering Task Force, a group of experts in the field, spent years and countless hours creating a new standard, but do not let that stop us from napkin-sketching up a new solution ourselves, I mean how smart can these experts really be?
[+] paulsutter|2 years ago|reply
That's way too logical. Have some respect for the artisanal bike shedding that went into IPv6!

Calling it IPv5 is genius though.

[+] anvuong|2 years ago|reply
I guess because it's not simply a text address, it's a protocol where a specific number of bytes in the packet (4 in this case) are dedicated for IP, you can't just simply modify this.
[+] matesz|2 years ago|reply
I never understood why AWS has so much appeal when it comes to cloud infrastructure. Why not cheaper clouds? Is it about scalability, reliability, speed, modernity of equipment, customer support, UI, speed of networks?

Let's say the requirement is to build a platform like Twitter with 100mln daily active users. Wouldn't cloud like Hetzner with AWS/GCP/Azure failover, survive this?

I worked with AWS as a developer for a long time, but in pretty much ever case 10 was more than enough.

Would be very grateful if someone could share some insight into it!

[+] abhishekjha|2 years ago|reply
What do you suggest? Something like a VPS service, DO?
[+] hnarn|2 years ago|reply
As someone who recently wanted to try out IPv6 to learn more about it, I can say that I welcome anything that might help improve the sorry state of IPv6 adoption. This is a hostile and destructive move, I mean obviously, it's Amazon after all, but one can at least hope that as IPv4 increasingly becomes a cost, it could drive interest to the alternative that has been left out in the cold for like two decades.

Most end-users don't care what they're using as long as they can access the Internet, and since our other option to IPv6 adoption is living in a CGNAT hellscape that destroys the whole peer-to-peer idea of the Internet, then for the love of all that is holy start moving. Personally I think nation states need to take a bigger responsibility here and create incentives to move the market, because it's one of those things where the negative effects aren't obvious until they're overwhelming.

[+] netcraft|2 years ago|reply
I personally dont think 45$ per year is going to change habits that much, especially for larger customers who have a lot of public IPs.
[+] kiririn|2 years ago|reply
Hobby customers can buy an entire VPS, complete with IPv4 to tunnel through, for 1/4 that
[+] lokar|2 years ago|reply
Already a lot of discussion about this at my job. It’s a lot of $ at scale. We will put a bunch of work in to avoid the fee.
[+] foobarian|2 years ago|reply
Huh, speaking of lots of public IPs, most of MIT's old class A is now owned by Amazon :-(

NetRange: 18.32.0.0 - 18.255.255.255

[+] grobbyy|2 years ago|reply
This is a hidden price hike. It would be more reasonable if there was a corresponding decrease in server costs.
[+] ketralnis|2 years ago|reply
I don't think either of those is true?

It's not hidden, they put it right up on their blog https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address... the opening line of which is "We are introducing a new charge for public IPv4 addresses" and when it starts and what the cost is. I assume like every other AWS charge it's broken out in great detail on their billing statements and even have APIs to query costs. Usually they send an email with these changes too so if they haven't I assume they will. It's a regular old price hike but it's not a hidden one.

Secondly since "the cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years", there's no accompanying decrease in server costs that would be "reasonable" to account for this. Charging for the IP itself makes total sense since that's the cost they're accounting for. If it were packed into the instance costs, then instances without a public IP would be paying for it too. This incentivises you to do exactly what they want you to do: use fewer public IPs where you don't need them. This is way more reasonable than an across-the-board instance cost bump which would be a hidden price hike. This is a bridge toll that covers the cost of the bridge by its users instead of raising taxes on everyone.

I guess you're wanting to pay the same and just distribute the cost between the IP and the instance differently? And hey me too, I love not being charged more. But they want to account for their costs without eating into their margin and this is how they're going about it. You don't have to like it; I sure don't. You can wish AWS would just keep eating the cost for you; me too! But I don't think "hidden" or "unreasonable" is accurate.

[+] whalesalad|2 years ago|reply
IPv4 is a finite resource. This is a forcing function to ensure that people who actually need IPv4 addresses are using them. Gotta pay to play.

I guarantee there are a ton of unused IP's just sitting on accounts doing absolutely nothing.

[+] marcus0x62|2 years ago|reply
Their costs for delivering one service are increasing so they should lower their prices on another?
[+] barryrandall|2 years ago|reply
The move may seem unreasonable, but it seems more unreasonable to expect anything different from the oligarchy.
[+] anderspitman|2 years ago|reply
Hot take. IPv6 adoption is never going to hit 100% because SNI routing covers most of the cases people actually need. If UDP functionality is necessary QUIC will be used. I wish this wasn't the case. It would be nice if the software was good enough that more people were enabled to self host.
[+] mythz|2 years ago|reply
Always more expensive on AWS: $0.005/hr =~ $3.60/mo

We pay $0.55/mo (€0.50) on Hetzner.

[+] codetrotter|2 years ago|reply
Good. Maybe we will soon see more widespread adoption of IPv6.
[+] sgjohnson|2 years ago|reply
Good. Anything that pushes people towards IPv6 is good news.

They should have charged more. $3.50/mo per IP for their average customer is going to be a completely insignificant amount of money.

[+] newaccount74|2 years ago|reply
Hetzner cloud has been charging for public IPv4 addresses for a while. It makes sense. If you have lots of servers, many of them probably don't need a public IPv4 address.