AWS to Start Charging for Public IPv4 Addresses in February 2024

Amazon AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is planning to charge organizations for the use of public IPv4 addresses. Starting on February 1, 2024, AWS customers will need to pay $0.005 per IP address per hour for all public IPv4 addresses.

According to AWS, the cost of purchasing a single IPv4 address increased by over 300 percent during the past five years. The upcoming change may have significant implications for numerous businesses that have extensive cloud workloads. AWS has advised its customers to migrate to IPv6 to prevent a substantial increase in their monthly bills.

“As you may know, IPv4 addresses are an increasingly scarce resource and the cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years. 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,” explained Jeff Barr AWS Chief Evangelist.

AWS to Begin Charging for Public IPv4 Address

The new price for public IPv4 addresses applies to all AWS services

AWS notes that the charges will be applicable to all AWS services, including Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) nodes, Relational Database Service (RDS) database instances, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Furthermore, the public IPv4 address price will apply across all AWS regions.

For the first 12 months, AWS clients who have the free EC2 tier will receive 750 hours of usage for public IPv4 addresses per month. Customers won’t be charged for using IP addresses they already own or bring to AWS with Amazon’s BYOIP feature.

AWS launches new Public IP Insights feature

AWS has introduced a new Public IP Insights feature in Amazon VPC IP Address Manager. This release will make it easier for administrators to monitor, analyze, and audit public IPv4 address usage in their environments.

Last but not least, the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) now includes information about public IPv4 address usage. It should help IT admins to understand how the upcoming change might affect their AWS bill.

It will be interesting to see how AWS clients will handle the challenges that come with transitioning to IPv6. This shift will require the acquisition of software, hardware, and network infrastructure that aligns with the new protocol. Companies may also have to set aside resources for training and testing within their organization.