Hello everyone,
I wanted to share some important updates from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that could impact how you use their services. AWS has announced a new charge for public IPv4 addresses, effective from February 1, 2024. This change will see a charge of $0.005 per IP per hour for all public IPv4 addresses, whether they are attached to a service or not.
Why the New Charge?
IPv4 addresses are becoming an increasingly scarce resource. Over the past five years, the cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address has risen by more than 300%. This new charge reflects AWS’s own costs and is intended to encourage users to be more frugal with their use of public IPv4 addresses. It’s also a nudge towards accelerating the adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and conservation measure.
Who Does This Affect?
This change applies to all AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) database instances, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) nodes, and other AWS services that can have a public IPv4 address allocated and attached. This is applicable across all AWS regions.
What About the AWS Free Tier?
The AWS Free Tier for EC2 will include 750 hours of public IPv4 address usage per month for the first 12 months, effective from February 1, 2024. You will not be charged for IP addresses that you own and bring to AWS using Amazon BYOIP.
Monitoring Your Usage
Starting from now, your AWS Cost and Usage Reports will automatically include public IPv4 address usage. When this price change goes into effect next year, you will also be able to use AWS Cost Explorer to see and better understand your usage.
Accelerating Your Adoption of IPv6
AWS is encouraging users to consider accelerating their adoption of IPv6. They have a new blog post showing how to use Elastic Load Balancers and NAT Gateways for ingress and egress traffic, while avoiding the use of a public IPv4 address for each instance that you launch.
Introducing Public IP Insights
To make it easier for you to monitor, analyze, and audit your use of public IPv4 addresses, AWS is launching Public IP Insights, a new feature of Amazon VPC IP Address Manager that is available at no cost. This tool will give you a better understanding of your security profile and help you make efficient use of public IPv4 addresses.
Final Thoughts
By using the new IP Insights tool and following the guidance shared by AWS, you should be ready to update your application to minimize the effect of the new charge. You may also want to consider using AWS Direct Connect to set up a dedicated network connection to AWS.
For more information on how to make the best use of public IPv4 addresses, be sure to read AWS’s new blog post, “Identify and Optimize Public IPv4 Address Usage on AWS”.
Stay tuned for more updates and insights!