Reposted from: CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)
Rare is more expensive, even for cloud computing giants.
Recently, Jeff Barr, Amazon's chief evangelist, published a blog, announcing that a new charging policy will be implemented for public IPv4 addresses. All public IPv4 addresses will be charged at $0.005 per hour per IP, regardless of whether they are attached to There is a fee for the service.
The implementation time is from February 1, 2024.
This move undoubtedly promoted the application of IPv6 indirectly, but the industry has mixed opinions on Amazon's charging behavior.
Four years ago, 4.2 billion IPv4 addresses were allotted
The so-called IPv4, the fourth version of the Internet Communication Protocol, is the fourth revision in the development process of the Internet Protocol, and it is also the first version of this protocol to be widely deployed.
Its address is a 32-bit number used to identify Internet devices. In terms of root servers, there are only 13 IPv4 root servers in the world, and one is the main root server in the United States. The remaining 12 are auxiliary root servers, 9 of which are in the United States, 2 in Europe, located in the UK and Sweden, and 1 in Asia in Japan.
In the past two decades, with the explosive growth of smart phones, personal computers, and Internet of Things devices, nearly 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses have been consumed.
This also made in 2019, the European Network Coordination Center (RIPE NCC), which is responsible for the allocation of Internet resources in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, reluctantly announced that as of November 25, 2019, all IPv4 addresses will be exhausted. This means that there are no more IPv4 addresses to allocate to ISPs and other large network infrastructure providers.
However, it should be noted that although IPv4 addresses have been allocated, it does not mean that IPv4 addresses can no longer be used in the industry.
AWS warns six months in advance: We're going to charge for IPv4!
For users who want to continue to use public IPv4 addresses, they mainly rely on recycling and the release of unused address blocks, either from closed organizations or from those that have migrated to IPv6 and are no longer needed. the address of.
It is not difficult to imagine that the intermediate process of obtaining increasingly scarce IPv4 has become complicated, and the cost has naturally risen. In this regard, according to Amazon, in the past five years, due to the difficulty of obtaining public IPv4 addresses, the cost of obtaining a single address has increased by more than 300%.
In the eyes of the cloud computing giant Amazon, this is a huge expense. In order to reduce costs, AWS made this decision and announced that it will start charging for IPv4 public network addresses next year.
Jeff Barr wrote in the announcement, "This change reflects our own costs, and is also intended to encourage people to be more frugal when using public IPv4 addresses and consider accelerating the adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and protection measure."
Going forward, Amazon will start charging all public IPv4 addresses at a policy of $0.005 per IP address per hour starting February 1, 2024.
These charges will apply to all AWS services, including EC2, Relational Database Service (RDS) database instances, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and will apply to all AWS regions (Commercial, AWS China, and GovCloud), Amazon said.
At first glance, $0.005 may seem like a small fee. But foreign media also reminded that this is an hourly fee and will apply to each public IPv4 address allocated in the account, whether it is attached to an AWS service or not.
Based on Amazon's disclosed fee schedule, a quick calculation shows that for an IPv4 address, the new fee amount will be $43.80 per year (0.05 * 24 hours a day * 365 days a year). If you have multiple IPv4 addresses, it will cost you a lot of money accumulated in one year.
However, Amazon also notes that customers don't pay a fee to bring their own IP addresses into AWS using Amazon BYOIP. In addition, AWS offers a free tier for EC2 that includes 750 hours of public IPv4 address usage per month for the first 12 months, effective February 1, 2024.
In the announcement, in order to help users audit the use of public IPv4 addresses, Amazon also launched a new public IP insight tool (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/ipam/what-it-is -ipam.html). Amazon hopes this free tool will guide users to view, sort, filter and learn more about every public IPv4 address they are using. It will also help users understand where updates to the app can minimize the impact of new fees.
Ten years of IPv6 has been launched, and the application progress is slow
In fact, as mentioned above, another reason for Amazon's charging policy is to promote the application of IPv6.
As a new version to replace IPv4, IPv6 has been officially launched for more than ten years. Compared to IPv4, which is limited to 4.3 billion devices due to the nature of its 32-bit addressing scheme, IPv6 with 128-bit addressing provides approximately 2 128 ( approximately 3.4×10 38 ) addresses. This should be enough for anyone.
At the same time, IPv6 does more than just expand the number of addresses available, or add digits to the length of phone numbers, it enables more efficient packet processing, improved performance, increased security, and more.
However, because the headers of IPv4 messages and IPv6 messages are very different, the two protocols are not interoperable. At the same time many organizations initially saw no need for change, especially as the management of migration from the old standard to the new standard can be complex, resulting in slow and gradual adoption of IPv6.
According to The Register, although the world's unallocated IPv4 addresses were officially exhausted in 2019, there are still six times as many entries in IPv4 routing tables as there are in IPv6, according to data released last year by RIPE NCC, the European regional Internet registry.
This has improved over time, and according to Google's latest internal graph charting IPv6 adoption among users, it is estimated that more than 42% of the Internet is currently using IPv6.
However, RIPE NCC has previously predicted that it may take 5-10 years for the world to truly abandon the IPv4 address space. Today is still the era of IPv4.
The IPv6 Controversy
Regarding Amazon's first mention of IPv4 charges, it is not known whether other companies will follow suit, but many netizens express their understanding and support.
@mrweasel：
I know of at least one company that released more than 50% of its IPv4 addresses today after a quick review and change after bitter complaints over the weekend.
Seeing this, I think it makes perfect sense for AWS to increase the price for IPv4 addresses. People don't care if they use IPv4 indiscriminately because AWS can ensure their customers always have enough addresses available.
However, there are also users who think that although there is nothing wrong with charging fees, there are constant problems in the process of using IPv6.
@furkansahin：
I recently started working for a startup. My main responsibility is to develop network functions for our bare metal cloud. We had IPv6 enabled by default, but it quickly became apparent that the biggest problem "wasn't" with the setup. IPv6 setup is actually quite simple if you start from scratch. The biggest problem with IPv6 is that the ecosystem is simply not ready for it. You can't even use GitHub without a proxy! So we had to start implementing IPv4 support right away, because virtual machines are pretty much useless for developers with IPv6 only.
@Habgdnv：
I recently tried deploying GitLab from scratch on an IPv6-only network, and my initial experience was not smooth. During the initial setup, I got an exception in the console. GitLab tries to obtain a Let's Encrypt certificate, but immediately fails because it does not listen on IPv6 addresses by default. We (at the company) had a similar problem a year ago when trying to deploy GlusterFS on an IPv6-only network, and it also failed. (I asked to only use V6, my manager was very upset) It is clear that while IPv6 may be the way of the future, the current ecosystem doesn't seem quite ready to support it yet. I've wanted to use IPv6-only Docker for years, and I'm really considering learning Go in order to write my own IPv6-only drivers.
So, are you or your company going well in the process of deploying IPv6? Welcome to share.
reference:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36942424
https://aws.amazon.com/cn/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address-charge-public-ip-insights/
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amazon-aws-to-charge-for-public-ipv4-address-next-year#xenforo-comments-3815487
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/31/aws_says_ipv4_addresses_cost/