AWS will start charging customers for public IPv4 addresses

Craig Hale
·2 min read
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AWS logo

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will start charging customers to use public IPv4 addresses from February 2024 amid rising costs and resource scarcity.

In a company blog post, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr explained that IPv4 addresses are an “increasingly scarce resource” which has seen costs rise by 300% in the past five years.

To that end, in-use public IPv4 addresses assigned to resources in customers’ VPC, Amazon Global Accelerator, and AWS Site-to-site VPN tunnel will become chargeable products, at $0.005 per IP per hour.

IPv4 just got more expensive

A secondary Elastic IP Address and idle Elastic IP Addresses will remain unchanged, chargeable at the same rate of $0.005 per hour.

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Barr said that not only is this designed to reflect the company’s own incurred costs, but also to “encourage [users] to be a bit more frugal with [their] use of public IPv4 addresses” in the hope that they modernize by adopting IPv6.

The change is set to come into play from February 1, 2024, at which point the AWS Free Tier for EC2 will include 750 hours of public IPv4 address usage per month for 12 months. Those using their own IP addresses via Amazon BYOIP will be excluded from the charge, too.

In an effort to push its customers toward IPv6, AWS has added a new ‘Public IP Insights’ area to the Amazon VPC IP Address Manager to help monitor, analyze, and audit public IPv4 address usage.

Given that we are estimated to have long run out of IPv4 addesses, those who manage to get one today are relying on abandoned and sold addresses. On the other hand, the number of IPv6 addresses available is frankly incomprehensible by the human brain.

Additionally, there are security, performance, and efficiency benefits, however migrating from v4 to v6 addresses has so far been an unwelcome task for many. With the price rise, it is hoped that more customers make the move.