What's really offensive about this is that AWS does not have good enough IPv6 support for most customers to migrate off of IPv4, even if they want to.<p>ALB uses 2-4 IPv4 addresses. It supports dualstack, but not IPv6-only.<p>CloudFront does not support IPv6 origins.<p>All APIs except for a handful are IPv4-only, so you either need a VPC endpoint (priced per month per AZ per API) or an IPv4 address to communicate with them.<p>It frustrates me that I'll be paying for a bunch of IPv4 addresses that I don't need for any business reason, I only have them because they're necessary within the AWS ecosystem.
What's interesting to me is that they always had this cost, but in the past it was always baked into the cost of anything that used a public IP (namely EC2).<p>The prices for IPv4 addresses finally got so high that they had to break it out into a separate charge because otherwise it would be too much to bake into the cost of everything. I also completely believe them when they say they are doing it to force people to be more intentional about their use of public IPv4.<p>And of course it's a great way to get people to move to IPv6, since those are still "free" (in quotes because those prices are still baked into the things that support them).
> <i>So the approximate value of Amazon's IPv4 estate today is about:
$4.6 Billion dollars!</i><p>> <i>AWS will likely make anywhere between $400 Million and $1 Billion dollars a year with this new IPv4 charge!</i><p>In other words, it's not clear AWS is "making" anything at all. It might take them over 10 years to pay back the cost of what it would take to acquire them today.<p>Now I assume Amazon is making <i>some</i> level of profit on them, but the article seems to confuse income with profit. "Making" money is generally understood to mean profit, not income.
What is raging is to know that IP v4 address ranges are provided at no cost to organisations. And even if they still had to acquire some from other organizations at a cost, there certainly don't have to pay a regular fee to keep them.<p>So in the end, they take a public good that is basically free, a lot lot lot of it, and like a hold up they make a lot of money racketeering you monthly because you are too insignificant to be allowed to own your own ips...
Related discussion on the ipv4 change announcement 6 months ago:<p><i>AWS to begin charging for public IPv4 addresses</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989798">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989798</a>
If Google just banked $3B by extending their server depreciation schedule, imagine how much more profitable AWS would be if they also did the same.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39199841">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39199841</a><p>I wouldn't be surprised if AWS are holding back on implementing this financial change for a future raining day quarter ... because it'd have a bigger impact than IPv4 billing.
Jeez. Eventually someone is going to break down and invent a new IP solution that doubles the number of addresses that we have now.<p>I mean if I were doing it, I'd probably make it more like 1,028 times bigger but maybe it would present as hubris. Addresses would be so plentiful they'd basically be free.<p>And since I am using magic to do all of this, I'd invent it over 20 years ago, so that it'd have been decades since we were still talking about it.
Can't they provide an anycast ip's like fly.io does to all their customers.
Most of the things are anyhow behind dns entries and i doubt people direct hit IP addresses.