AWS introduces fees for public IPv4 addresses

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced a new fee structure for customers with public IPv4 addresses, which has significant financial consequences. Six months ago, Amazon announced that it would charge a fee of 0.005 US dollars per hour and IP for all public IPv4 addresses from February 1, 2024. This fee applies to all public IPv4 addresses, regardless of whether they are assigned to a service or not. AWS justifies this measure with the increasing scarcity and difficulties in managing these addresses. In addition, the cost of acquiring a single public IPv4 address has risen by more than 300 percent in the last five years.

The price change, which AWS estimates will generate between 400 million and one billion US dollars in additional annual revenue, affects all AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and other services that can use public IPv4 addresses. All AWS regions are affected by the introduction of the fee without exception. However, there are some exceptions. For example, the AWS Free Tier for EC2 will include 750 hours of monthly use of public IPv4 addresses in the first year from February 1, 2024 and will therefore be free of charge. Addresses that customers bring in themselves and use via Amazon BYOIP are excluded from the fee, as are IPv4 addresses used exclusively internally.

AWS, meanwhile, has updated its cost and usage reports and AWS Cost Explorer to automatically include public IPv4 address usage. These tools allow customers to better understand and manage their usage.

Accelerating the introduction of IPv6

The gradual replacement of IPv4 addresses with IPv6, which AWS is pushing ahead with by introducing the new fee, is a response to several technical and operational challenges. Originally, the IPv4 protocol was designed with a 32-bit addressing scheme that provides approximately 4.3 billion unique addresses for devices on the Internet. This number, once considered sufficient, is now far from adequate due to the exponential growth of internet-enabled devices such as smartphones, tablets, PCs and IoT (Internet of Things) devices. In contrast, the introduction of IPv6, which uses 128-bit addresses and thus enables around 340 undecillion (a 1 with 66 zeros) unique addresses, offers a virtually inexhaustible address space that will meet the needs of the global internet far into the future.

In addition to expanding the address space, IPv6 brings improvements in terms of efficiency and performance. By simplifying the data packet header, IPv6 speeds up processing by routers and thus improves network performance. It natively supports multicast addressing, which makes the transmission of data streams to multiple recipients simultaneously more efficient. Another advantage of IPv6 is the simplification of network configuration. Mechanisms such as Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) allow devices to automatically generate an IP address without the need for a DHCP server. This makes it much easier to set up and manage networks.

Greater security of IPv6

IPv6 was also designed with a stronger focus on security. While the IPsec protocol set for secure data transmission was optional with IPv4, it is an integral part of the specification with IPv6, including native support. This improves the possibilities for encryption and authentication at the IP level and helps to increase security on the Internet. In addition, IPv6 improves support for mobile devices through mechanisms such as Mobile IPv6, which allows mobile devices to seamlessly switch between networks without losing connection or ongoing transmissions.

The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is therefore not only a response to the address space shortage, but also a comprehensive modernization of the Internet that improves network efficiency, increases security and provides support for the next generation of the Internet and its applications.

To reduce the use of public IPv4 addresses, AWS has improved EC2 Instance Connect to allow connections to instances via private IPv4 addresses. This in turn reduces the need for public IPv4 addresses for administrative purposes. In addition, Public IP Insights, a new, free feature of the Amazon VPC IP Address Manager, has been introduced to help customers manage their use of public IPv4 addresses more efficiently and better analyze their own security profile.

Become an AWS Certified Solutions Architect

In the 4-day course "Architecting on AWS with JAM" in which you will learn how to make the best use of the AWS cloud, AWS services and their integration into cloud-based solutions, you will be prepared for certification as an AWS Certified Solutions Architect. You will learn all about EC2 instances, IP addressing, VPC endpoints, edge services and much more. The course concludes with a JAM day, where you will work together as a team and compete with other teams to solve real challenges in a secure AWS environment.