IPv4 surcharge – Your AWS invoice goes up this February
As of tomorrow, your AWS invoice will go up! Efficient February 1, 2024, there can be a cost of $0.005 per IP per hour for all public IPv4 addresses, whether or not connected to a service or not. That is a complete of $43.80 per 12 months, a fairly hefty quantity! The explanation for that is outlined within the AWS announcement:
As you might know, IPv4 addresses are an more and more scarce useful resource and the fee to amass a single public IPv4 tackle has risen greater than 300% over the previous 5 years. This modification displays our personal prices and can also be supposed to encourage you to be a bit extra frugal along with your use of public IPv4 addresses.
On this weblog, I will cowl how one can get monetary savings in your AWS invoice by eliminating pointless public IPv4 addresses utilizing Border0. However earlier than we go there, let us take a look at what number of IPv4 addresses Amazon has, how a lot that is value, and the way a lot AWS will make with this new cost to your month-to-month invoice.
What number of IPv4 Addresses does AWS have?
Working the Amazon infrastructure and maintaining with the unbelievable development of AWS requires an enormous quantity of IP addresses. And so it comes as no shock that over time, Amazon has spent some huge cash buying an infinite variety of IPv4 addresses. All so we will proceed to spin up our ec2 situations, load balancers, and NAT gateways with out worrying about IPv4 addresses.
To find out precisely what number of IPv4 addresses Amazon has, we will take a look at numerous publicly accessible information units. The info I used is the AWS IP json and the varied whois (ARIN, RIPE, and so forth) information entries.
Crunching all that information, we will decide that Amazon has at the very least 131,932,752 IPv4 addresses.
Let’s spherical that up, and say 132 Million IPv4 addresses! That is the equal of virtually eight /8’s 😮
Curious concerning the information, and what IPv4 addresses have been included? See this link for the raw data.
How a lot is the Amazon IPv4 property value?
IPv4 addresses are like digital actual property. These 32-bit integers have actual financial worth and might be purchased and bought. In reality, the value of IPv4 addresses has elevated considerably over the past decade, and would have made a superb funding in the event you obtained in early!
So the subsequent logical query is, how a lot is the Amazon IPv4 property value? Based mostly on information from ipv4.world, the common worth for an IPv4 tackle is at present ~35 {dollars}. With that information in hand, we will do our back-of-the-napkin math:
So the approximate worth of Amazon’s IPv4 property in the present day is about:
$4.6 Billion {dollars}! Not too shabby!
How a lot cash will AWS make with the brand new IPv4 cost?
Talking of {dollars}, let’s have a look if we will make an informed guess about how a lot AWS will make from the brand new IPv4 cost. For that, we want the value per IP and the variety of IPv4 addresses in use by AWS prospects.
We all know the primary variable, $0.005 per IP per hour, or $43.80 per 12 months per IPv4 tackle. The second variable, the variety of IPv4 addresses in use by AWS prospects, is more durable to find out. Nevertheless, we will make some educated guesses for enjoyable!
As talked about, the numerous variable right here is what number of IP addresses are used at any given time by AWS prospects. Let’s discover a couple of situations, beginning with a really conservative estimate, say 10% of the IPv4 addresses printed within the AWS JSON (79M IPv4 addresses) are used for a 12 months. That is 7.9 Million IPv4 addresses x $43.80, virtually $346 Million a 12 months. At 25% utilization, that is almost $865 Million a 12 months. And at 30% utilization, that is a billion {dollars}!
That provides us a fairly good indicator of the dimensions we’re speaking about. One other strategy is to attempt to measure it. What number of IP addresses are alive throughout the AWS community proper now? AWS conveniently publishes all addresses, so we may ship an ICMP echo request (a ping) to all of them and measure what number of ship again an echo reply.
That appeared like a enjoyable venture! So I wrote a fast program that downloads the JSON with all of the AWS IP addresses and filters out the classes “AMAZON,” “EC2,” and “GLOBAL ACCELERATOR.” We will assume these are all of the customer-used (charged) IP addresses. I.e., we’re not going to ping providers like Route53 Well being Checks or Cloudfront as these received’t present up in your invoice as an IPv4 cost.
This system sends a single ICMP packet to all IP addresses and collects all of the replies. With this, we’ve some precise measurement information, and we observe that we acquired a reply from roughly 6 Million IPv4 addresses.
6 Million addresses x $43.80 is $ 263 Million yearly!
That’s one other good information level. Nevertheless, keep in mind that many ec2 situations and different providers may have strict safety teams and, by default, will not reply to a ping packet. So, it is truthful to say that six million energetic IPs is absolutely the minimal. The precise variety of energetic IPv4 addresses may simply be double that given the varied default safety teams blocking ICMP.
Given this information, I imagine it is truthful to say that AWS will seemingly make wherever between $400 Million and $1 Billion {dollars} a 12 months with this new IPv4 cost! That is a pleasant bump for AWS, particularly on condition that this was supplied without spending a dime till in the present day.
Decreasing your AWS invoice with Border0
Your AWS providers, resembling ec2 situations, could have public IPv4 addresses for quite a lot of causes. One widespread purpose is to have administration entry to your servers. For instance, utilizing SSH or RDP. Or to entry the app operating in your machine, like a database or HTTP software.
A few of your functions ought to seemingly solely be accessible to approved customers and, ideally, not linked on to the Web. For instance, recent Border0 research confirmed that botnets are actively compromising publicly accessible Mysql and Postgres servers! You do not need these unprotected on the Web for everybody to poke at.
The place doable, we suggest operating your AWS infrastructure in a personal subnet with solely a NAT gateway for outbound Web connectivity. This manner, they’re shielded from the Web, considerably lowering the chance of getting compromised. As a bonus, you save your self the AWS IPv4 cost! (be aware: the cost is just for public IP addresses).
With the deployment of a Border0 connector in your non-public community, you and the remainder of your group can nonetheless entry all providers utilizing simply your current Single Signal-on credentials without having a VPN.
Deploying Border0 is easier than you may think! Curious to offer it a attempt? Take a look at our terraform example or this blog on Border0 for AWS.
Border0 presents a generous free tier, and getting began is straightforward!
With Border0, entry is simpler and safer; your engineers and safety group will adore it. And, because you’re saving on public IPs, your FinOps people can be pleased, too!