from the rent-seeking-for-intangible-assets dept.
AWS to charge customers for public IPv4 addresses from 2024:
Cloud giant AWS will start charging customers for public IPv4 addresses from next year, claiming it is forced to do this because of the increasing scarcity of these and to encourage the use of IPv6 instead.
It is now four years since we officially ran out of IPv4 ranges to allocate, and since then, those wanting a new public IPv4 address have had to rely on address ranges being recovered, either from from organizations that close down or those that return addresses they no longer require as they migrate to IPv6.
If Amazon's cloud division is to be believed, the difficulty in obtaining public IPv4 addresses has seen the cost of acquiring a single address rise by more than 300 percent over the past five years, and as we all know, the business is a little short of cash at the moment, so is having to pass these costs on to users.
"This change reflects our own costs and is also intended to encourage you to be a bit more frugal with your use of public IPv4 addresses and to think about accelerating your adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and conservation measure," writes AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr, on the company news blog.
The update will come into effect on February 1, 2024, when AWS customers will see a charge of $0.005 (half a cent) per IP address per hour for all public IPv4 addresses. These charges will apparently apply whether the address is attached to a service or not, and like many AWS charges, appear inconsequential at first glance but can mount up over time if a customer is using many of them.
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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
AWS could rake in between $400 million and $1 billion a year from charging customers for public IPv4 addresses while migration to IPv6 remains slow.
The cloud computing kingpin signaled last year that it would start charging customers for public IPv4 addresses from February 1, as covered by The Register at the time.
AWS cited increasing scarcity and claimed the cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address for customer use had risen more than 300 percent over the past few years.
Fortunately, the charge is hardly ruinous – $0.005 (half a cent) per IP address per hour, which equates to a total cost of $43.80 per year for each public IPv4 address you have – excluding any IP addresses that you might own and opt to bring to AWS using Amazon's BYOIP (Bring Your Own IP) service.
However a technologist has done the calculations and estimated that across all users, this will add up to a sum of between $400 million and $1 billion a year for AWS. Not bad for something that was being offered completely free just a few days ago (and is still offered for 750 hours a month at no cost in the AWS free tier).
The source of the billion-dollar claim is Andree Toonk, founder and CEO of network services biz Border0, who is presumably trying to generate business for his own company.
Toonk used Amazon's own IP address range data to estimate that the cloud colossus has at least 131,932,752 IPv4 addresses. Based on the average price for an IPv4 address being about $35 at the time of writing, this means that AWS is sitting on about $4.6 billion, should it wish to divest itself of them.
(Score: 2) by darkpixel on Friday August 04 2023, @05:49PM (9 children)
Gotta love Amazon's lack of clear pricing.
$0.005/hr? So that's $3.72/ip/mo?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 04 2023, @06:37PM (6 children)
What exactly is unclear about it?
Yes, if you use it continuously for 31 days (744 hours) then it will cost you $3.72. But if you use it for only two hours then it will cost you 1¢.
It might be a bit less than $3.72, I dunno how exactly Amazon invoices their customers but some other cloud providers cap out the monthly amounts; e.g., Digital Ocean does not charge for more than 600 hours per calendar month. So with DO, if you accrue charges continuously, you pay the same amount in February as you do in July.
(Score: 2, Troll) by darkpixel on Friday August 04 2023, @08:12PM (5 children)
Cool, now tell me how much I'll spend in any given month for a public IP attached to a load balancer fronting a kubernetes cluster consisting of 4 nodes with 8 virtual CPUs and 16 GB of RAM and a Postgres database with 8 GB RAM and 140 GB of disk that typically averages around 50,000 requests per second but occasionally spikes up to half a million requests per second throughout the day.
Yup. I can tell you how much I would pay for something like that with DO. Around $520/mo plus tax.
Is Amazon anywhere south of $1,000/mo for that? It's been a while since I checked, but about 5 years ago I helped a company move a ~$9k/mo workload from Amazon to an ~$800/mo workload under Digital Ocean with no code changes related to application optimization.
I honestly don't get what the fanaticism is with AWS.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 04 2023, @08:32PM (2 children)
WTF does any of that have to do with the pricing being discussed in this article? Maybe some other aspects of the business have unclear pricing but the quoted price for one public IPv4 address is $0.005 per hour. Assuming they are not lying about it (like Verizon Math) I simply don't understand how this can be considered a "lack of clear pricing"...
I agree, it seems expensive, but that's not the same thing as a "lack of clear pricing".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2023, @03:39PM (1 child)
$0.000000000000001387/picosecond
or
$3/mo
Which one is clearer to a human being and which one can be easily explained to a non-technical accounting department?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 07 2023, @12:51AM
If you could pay for 5 picoseconds of usage, then it might make sense to quote by the picosecond, but they don't sell services by the picosecond, so this is a straw man.
However, you can buy 5 hours of usage.
If I want to buy 5 hours, then saying it costs $3/mo is completely unhelpful.
(Score: 2) by GloomMower on Saturday August 05 2023, @12:24PM (1 child)
Nice, way to go! I currently run hybrid cloud from AWS, but I should probably look to digital ocean. Where did most of the cost savings come from? Maybe I wouldn't need to do the hybrid part.
(Score: 2) by darkpixel on Sunday August 06 2023, @03:53PM
For the client, most of the cost savings came from cheaper pricing without having to know or understand how to size and calculate nodes. I did a *very* rough check, and an 8 GB 2 VCPU machine on DO is $42/mo, and on AWS a t3.large appears to be $61.90. So it does look like Amazon's pricing has improved since the last time I used it...but I'd bet they still have bizarre crap where you get better pricing by locking in to a 1-year or multi-year contract at "guaranteed usage" or whatever.
Then again, I just tried the pricing calculator and it asked some phenomenally dumb questions like "Baseline IO rate: Enter the number of IOs per second that your workload consumes during off-peak periods." Uh...what IOs? Disk operations? Queries? Who the hell has any idea how many queries their application is going to consume every hour or month? I might get zero traffic to my site. There could be a spike and I could get half a million hits per minute. *grunble*
Anyways, like I said, the big cost savings was the price of VMs/k8s clusters, and there was a fair amount of savings by not having to hire someone who's full-time job was to make sense of the horrible AWS pricing and deal with all the minutiae of roles, policies and other administrivia.
(Score: 2) by deimios on Friday August 04 2023, @07:55PM (1 child)
An hour is usually 60 seconds. Leap seconds nonsense aside.
A month is between 28 and 31 days. Way less precise.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 04 2023, @08:05PM
Wow, you live life in the fast lane!
The rest of us are stuck with boring old 3600-second hours :/
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Friday August 04 2023, @08:21PM
I've been paying five dollars a month for years now for my permanent IP number at my ISP.
But I provide my own server in my living room.
And there is a fixed monthly fee for all the data I can pump up or down.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by ikanreed on Friday August 04 2023, @09:04PM (7 children)
Setting aside legacy applications, and their assumptions about address formats(which are a big deal in the corporate world, admittedly), is there any meaningful need for an ipv4 address?
We did the whole ipv6 rollout against naysayers and slow, lazy ISPs like 10 years ago now. The world really has moved on.
If anything amazon is being responsible in prodding particularly lazy developers to move to the 21st century.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday August 05 2023, @12:33AM (5 children)
How many ordinary users are there that still use old systems (whether software or hardware) that operate only on IPv4?
How many users use the network from a coffee shop that knows only IPv4?
If those are your customers, you'd better be able to deal in IPv4 yourself.
You can set your DNS records to preferentially hand out IPv6, but when that's not good enough, you'd better be prepared to dish out an IPv4 number or lose that customer.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday August 05 2023, @03:50PM (3 children)
Are there old IPv4 only systems that still get security updates?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday August 05 2023, @06:53PM (2 children)
I don't know. Why is that important? I have ipv4/v6 dual stack systems that no longer get security updates either, and dual stack systems that do.
That said, my ISP won't even transit IPv6 packets on my link, forcing me to use dual stack systems if they access resources outside my network, which is configured to use/prefer IPv6 internally. And that's the problem.
I've repeatedly requested IPv6 blocks from my ISP, but each time I was either met with "what's IPv6?" or "we're rolling that out, but have no time frame for your local area." It's been years. My previous ISP at least admitted that they have no plans to provide IPv6 to their customers. Which sucks too, but is at least more honest.
I'm all for deprecating IPv4 (I pay $5/month per IP address -- one of which my ISP forces me to use on their superfluous router), but until it's actually ubiquitous (my ISP is one of the top five in the US -- and I have a "business" account, which was the only way I could get static IP addresses at all -- not some local ISP) for end users.
IPv4 needs to die a quick, painless death, but instead it just shambles on like a zombie.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday August 07 2023, @04:05AM (1 child)
I wasn't aware that US ISPs are that backward.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday August 07 2023, @03:11PM
Sadly, they are.
What's worse is that ARIN [arin.net] delegates IP address allocations to ISPs (who act as RIRs and, as such, control who -- except for large organizations -- gets IP addresses, in the US at least) unless you can demonstrate that you have a large enough environment to "justify" a direct allocation [arin.net] to an "end user."
And more's the pity.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Sunday August 06 2023, @05:53AM
Lots of ISPs still don't offer IPv6 addresses. It's really kind of sad.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday August 05 2023, @12:59AM
If this fee deters people who don't actually *need* IPv4 from using it, there will likely be enough IPv4 numbers to go around.