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In a blog post set to coincide with the annual AWS NYC Summit, Jeff Barr announced that the cloud titan would begin charging for public IPv4 addresses on February 1st, 2024.
Previously, you were only charged for unattached Elastic IPv4 allocations, but once the EIP was associated with another resource, like a load balancer or EC2 instance, the EIP itself was free. I mean the cost was probably bundled into the other resource in some way, but you were no longer being charged directly for the public IPv4 address you were consuming.
The new charge will be a mere $.005 per hour or about $3.60 a month, which ain’t much if you’re frugal about public IPv4 addresses, but could be a serious chunk of change if you’ve been hogging a whole bunch of slash 24s to the tune of about $900 a month per block.
The justification is, of course, the scarcity of public IPv4 address space, and the need for AWS to continue to purchase more addresses at an ever rising cost. What’s a poor cloud architect to do? Go IPv6 of course! And AWS does provide some guidance in the blog post around enabling IPv6 in your AWS environments. That’s not a trivial ask, which is perhaps why they’ve given six months notice about the price hike.
Reaction from the hoi polloi has been mixed, with most people understanding that public IPv4 address space is a dwindling resource, while rightly pointing out that AWS has not exactly embraced IPv6 for all its services. Perhaps that will change in the next six months as the price change looms ever closer, or more likely, most organizations will simply pay the extra cost and move on with their lives.