[HN Gopher] AWS to begin charging for public IPv4 addresses
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       AWS to begin charging for public IPv4 addresses
        
       Author : realshadow
       Score  : 150 points
       Date   : 2023-08-03 18:31 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.infoq.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.infoq.com)
        
       | cferry wrote:
       | The only barrier for me to go IPv6-only is those VPS that are
       | provided with a _single_ /128 IPv6, and I do not know of a
       | service that would offer IPv6 tunneling other than HE, that
       | requires an IPv4 endpoint. The day I get a full /48 or /64 with
       | my VPSes, I'm ready to drop IPv4.
        
         | kccqzy wrote:
         | Amazon gives you more than a single /128. So your complaint is
         | irrelevant if you actually use AWS.
        
       | devit wrote:
       | Do they offer shared IPv4 addresses with routing by HTTPS SNI?
        
         | Hikikomori wrote:
         | On ELB yes.
        
           | JoshTriplett wrote:
           | ELB is a substantial cost itself, though.
        
             | eastbound wrote:
             | And not very good, together with the auto scaling groups,
             | it performs the record act of not being able to do an
             | instance refresh without downtime. We've put countless
             | hours into that, seems like a simple problem, forums say
             | it's not solved.
        
               | dilyevsky wrote:
               | Could you point to relevant thread please?
        
               | Hikikomori wrote:
               | With a single instance? Could also do blue green instead.
        
               | zomglings wrote:
               | This is not true.
               | 
               | You have to define health checks on your instances that
               | reflect the availability of all services they host.
               | 
               | And you have to allow there to be more instances than
               | your target number in each autoscaling group.
        
       | anderspitman wrote:
       | Hot take. IPv6 adoption is never going to hit 100% because SNI
       | routing covers most of the cases people actually need. If UDP
       | functionality is necessary QUIC will be used. I wish this wasn't
       | the case. It would be nice if the software was good enough that
       | more people were enabled to self host.
        
         | NoZebra120vClip wrote:
         | Which has been a more significant driver of address-space
         | exhaustion: web servers, or consumer/corporate client devices?
        
         | kccqzy wrote:
         | Not a hot take at all. We don't need 100% IPv6 adoption because
         | we can't control what people do in their private networks. If a
         | load balancer supports IPv6 that's good enough, even if the
         | load balancer talks to the backend over IPv4.
        
         | supertrope wrote:
         | In practice the Internet does not deliver IP packets. Only UDP
         | or TCP is universally supported. Some firewalls, security
         | appliances, filters, and proxies limit end to end connectivity
         | to just TCP 443. Everything over IP has turned into everything
         | over HTTP.
        
       | grobbyy wrote:
       | This is a hidden price hike. It would be more reasonable if there
       | was a corresponding decrease in server costs.
        
         | barryrandall wrote:
         | The move may seem unreasonable, but it seems more unreasonable
         | to expect anything different from the oligarchy.
        
         | marcus0x62 wrote:
         | Their costs for delivering one service are increasing so they
         | should lower their prices on another?
        
           | ribosometronome wrote:
           | If they're separating out functionality from that service and
           | charging for it, sure. Customers who don't pay extra are
           | getting less service than they used to for the same money
           | they used to pay.
        
             | ketralnis wrote:
             | > Customers who don't pay extra are getting less service
             | than they used to for the same money they used to pay
             | 
             | Sure, yeah. That's how price increases work. Nobody's
             | arguing that it's not a price increase. But if your
             | delivered pizza's costs are fuel+ingredients and the price
             | of fuel goes up, well, the whole price goes up or you have
             | to give on the amount of pizza. The price of the
             | ingredients didn't go down, so yeah you're just going to
             | have to pay more or get less pizza. Sorry.
             | 
             | You can quibble on the pizzeria's margin I guess: AWS could
             | just eat the increased price themselves, and probably have
             | been until now. But apparently they don't want to so
             | they're raising the price to compensate in frankly the most
             | reasonable way possible. AWS has insane pricing for many of
             | its services, especially bandwidth, but this isn't one of
             | them.
        
         | whalesalad wrote:
         | IPv4 is a finite resource. This is a forcing function to ensure
         | that people who actually need IPv4 addresses are using them.
         | Gotta pay to play.
         | 
         | I guarantee there are a ton of unused IP's just sitting on
         | accounts doing absolutely nothing.
        
           | mark242 wrote:
           | Addresses were already being charged if they weren't attached
           | to an interface. Increase that charge if you're looking to
           | churn unused IP addresses.
        
             | jeremyjh wrote:
             | That would not catch every public IP address that is
             | actually unused, because it can be attached to an interface
             | and yet not be needed or actually used by any client. But I
             | don't agree with GP that this is an important reason for
             | the price increase. They are increasing prices simply
             | because costs have increased.
        
               | mark242 wrote:
               | Anything that an IP address can be attached to is already
               | accumulating a charge, just by existing and running. EC2,
               | NAT gateway, ELB, etc. What's "actually unused" then?
               | Minimum amount of traffic? I don't think it's in Amazon's
               | purview to make those judgement calls.
        
               | jeremyjh wrote:
               | What I meant by unused is that there might not be a
               | client that ever connects to that IP address, so the
               | public IP address itself might not be used even if its
               | attached to a resource.
               | 
               | > I don't think it's in Amazon's purview to make those
               | judgement calls.
               | 
               | I already said I don't agree with GP that this is a
               | motive for Amazon.
        
         | ketralnis wrote:
         | I don't think either of those is true?
         | 
         | It's not hidden, they put it right up on their blog
         | https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address...
         | the opening line of which is "We are introducing a new charge
         | for public IPv4 addresses" and when it starts and what the cost
         | is. I assume like every other AWS charge it's broken out in
         | great detail on their billing statements and even have APIs to
         | query costs. Usually they send an email with these changes too
         | so if they haven't I assume they will. It's a regular old price
         | hike but it's not a hidden one.
         | 
         | Secondly since "the cost to acquire a single public IPv4
         | address has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years",
         | there's no accompanying decrease in server costs that would be
         | "reasonable" to account for this. Charging for the IP itself
         | makes total sense since that's the cost they're accounting for.
         | If it were packed into the instance costs, then instances
         | without a public IP would be paying for it too. This
         | incentivises you to do exactly what they want you to do: use
         | fewer public IPs where you don't need them. This is way more
         | reasonable than an across-the-board instance cost bump which
         | _would_ be a hidden price hike. This is a bridge toll that
         | covers the cost of the bridge by its users instead of raising
         | taxes on everyone.
         | 
         | I guess you're wanting to pay the same and just distribute the
         | cost between the IP and the instance differently? And hey me
         | too, I love not being charged more. But they want to account
         | for their costs without eating into their margin and this is
         | how they're going about it. You don't have to _like_ it; I sure
         | don 't. You can wish AWS would just keep eating the cost for
         | you; me too! But I don't think "hidden" or "unreasonable" is
         | accurate.
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | [dupe]
        
       | londons_explore wrote:
       | As long as IPv6 remains free, and there is some kind of ipv4
       | accessible proxy for web stuff for free, I'm happy.
        
         | mnutt wrote:
         | I don't see where the latter is the case? For that I believe
         | regular NAT gateway bandwidth charges apply?
        
         | blibble wrote:
         | the ipv6 support is sporadic and not in all regions
         | 
         | https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ipv6-su...
         | 
         | why are these large hosting companies so incompetent?
        
           | psanford wrote:
           | aws is many things but 'incompetent' is not one of them.
        
             | blibble wrote:
             | explain that page any other way
        
               | est31 wrote:
               | AWS has spent billions (with a b) on ipv4 addresses:
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36991477
               | 
               | This investment wasn't just of a strategic nature: they
               | have enough market power to hold back the move towards
               | ipv6.
        
               | blibble wrote:
               | how does reducing your competitiveness in the ipv4 market
               | (what they've done today) hurt ipv6?
               | 
               | it will have the exact opposite effect
        
           | Beached wrote:
           | because they don't have to be. when you own 20% of the entire
           | Internet, you can just do whatever you want, very few can
           | compete
        
         | ArchOversight wrote:
         | > ipv4 accessible proxy for web stuff for free
         | 
         | Not within AWS.
        
       | wongarsu wrote:
       | This finally puts real pressure on software and services to work
       | on IPv6 only. I wouldn't be surprised if within 1-2 release
       | cycles lots of distributions suddenly update just fine with just
       | IPv6, package mangers can download packages over IPv6, lots of
       | APIs gain solid and well-tested IPv6 support, etc.
        
         | NoZebra120vClip wrote:
         | TIL that my Chromebook connects to the Internet with a 6to4
         | address rather than the real /64 that my ISP assigns.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | p1mrx wrote:
           | This seems unlikely, as 6to4 was deprecated in 2015:
           | https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7526
        
             | NoZebra120vClip wrote:
             | I couldn't believe it either, but using Chome on ChromeOS
             | 114, updated yesterday, all the public sites report that I
             | am connecting from 2002::/16
        
               | p1mrx wrote:
               | Interesting. It's only possible to terminate 2002::/16
               | using a public IPv4 address, so if you're behind a NAT
               | router, then the router itself must be running 6to4.
        
               | NoZebra120vClip wrote:
               | Aha! Thanks for the hint: I recently had to reconfigure
               | my router from factory settings. The IPv6 configuration,
               | sure enough, was kicked into 6to4 mode. I set it to "Auto
               | Config" and now I've got end-to-end IPv6 connectivity
               | with, look Ma, no NAT!
               | 
               | Thank you, p1mrx!
        
         | Macha wrote:
         | As a business... $40/year/server is nothing.
         | 
         | As a individual/hobbyist, it's a much bigger disincentive.
         | 
         | For students and the like, it might actually be prohibitive.
         | 
         | The problem is it's really the first group that needs to drive
         | the remaining IPv6 adoption by replacing their middleware boxes
         | etc. and they're the group who are unlikely to care at this
         | price.
        
         | kccqzy wrote:
         | Apple has been demanding apps support IPv6 only for years now.
         | They reject your app if it fails under NAT64. The end user side
         | is mostly a solved problem.
        
           | ketralnis wrote:
           | For iOS maybe. Most of those applications are also using
           | Apple's networking libraries and are effectively required to
           | be on Apple's infinite software update treadmill to continue
           | to be listed, keeping them young and hip in perpetuity. This
           | is the upside to that treadmill, things are up to date or
           | just stop working.
           | 
           | But I don't think that's representative. "Or just stop
           | working" isn't a valid alternative to the rest of the world.
           | Outside of mobile ecosystems and maybe web development most
           | things aren't on these 6 to 12 month update cycles. It would
           | be absolutely unreasonable to tell a hospital that every
           | piece of hardware and software and MRI machine in their
           | building has to be upgraded every 2 years or it's positively
           | geriatric and do you even `pacman -Syyu` bro?
           | 
           | Theres a whole world of things that haven't been, and may
           | never be, transitioned. Useful things like utility control
           | computers and even peoples' 10 year old, still perfectly
           | functional and supported desktops. Heck, my "end user" newly-
           | installed fibre ISP doesn't support IPv6! And their previous
           | DSL installation to the same address did! So much for "solved
           | problem" :(
        
             | kccqzy wrote:
             | A hospital's MRI machine doesn't need an internet
             | connection. IPv4 only intranets are fine and we are never
             | going to get rid of them.
             | 
             | But anything that connects to the internet needs to be
             | updated regularly, if only for security and vulnerability
             | reasons. If you have a 10-year-old functional and supported
             | desktop, it most likely supports being IPv6 only just fine.
             | The typical 10-year-old desktop came from the factory with
             | Windows 8 and could be upgraded to Windows 10 (since it's
             | supported). It even gets relatively new features such as
             | IPv6 RDNSS allowing DHCP-less deployments.
        
               | p_l wrote:
               | Windows networking became v6-first in Vista, over a
               | decade ago.
        
         | candiddevmike wrote:
         | Businesses and organizations are holding IPv6 back, not
         | consumers. No one I talk to is prioritizing IPv6 migrations or
         | spending money to upgrade gear that will support it. Maybe some
         | net new stuff might get it, but for most businesses IPv4 is and
         | will be the default, simply because they can't be bothered to
         | do something different.
        
           | jiggawatts wrote:
           | It's worse than that: new software and hardware is being
           | developed or rolled out right now that is incapable of
           | working on an IPv6 network. Not just unable to use it, but
           | actively incompatible -- failing to run if _other_ devices
           | use IPv6!
           | 
           | This was an issue with Azure's PostgreSQL service, which
           | would fail if you deployed other unrelated IPv6 services in
           | the same virtual network.
           | 
           | We need a guild of software engineering so that the people
           | responsible for this can be summarily ejected from it.
        
           | 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
           | Serious question, is there any enterprise gear made today
           | which does not support IPv6? I have assumed that the natural
           | hardware upgrade cycles made it so 99% of all active
           | equipment could support the technology, even if it was not
           | configured to do so.
        
             | candiddevmike wrote:
             | That door alarm thing that has a Windows XP workstation VM
             | the facilities team touches once a month probably doesn't
             | support IPv6.
             | 
             | Repeat that scenario across multiple BUs and multiple
             | locations and no leader wants to commit to doing that kind
             | of due diligence. What's wrong with our current IP?
        
             | jandrese wrote:
             | Man in the middle certificate re-signing deep packet
             | inspection firewalls are notorious for not supporting IPv6.
             | Most everything else has switched, but many network admins
             | fear IPv6 and don't want to have to learn something new.
        
           | Aeolun wrote:
           | Hmm, I use IPv4 mostly because nobody in their right mind can
           | remember a IPv6 address...
        
             | post-it wrote:
             | Who's out there remembering IPv4 addresses?
        
               | brickteacup wrote:
               | If only there were some sort of a system for translating
               | human readable names to network addresses...
        
       | mgaunard wrote:
       | Anything in the cloud is 10 times the price it's worth.
       | 
       | It's essentially a tax on the people gullible enough to believe
       | in cloud tech or unable to set up real hardware.
        
       | anonymous344 wrote:
       | inflation is wild. dollar is predicted to crash any time. So now
       | all the big companies are just taking what they can. I've seen
       | everywhere 40% increases to prices, without any notification to
       | the customer, for example Misshosting and many others
        
         | sacnoradhq wrote:
         | Inflation has been aberrant over the past 3 years in some
         | areas, i.e., food, from profit-price spirals but there is not
         | widespread hyperinflation.
         | 
         | No one reputable is predicting the USD will crash imminently.
         | 
         | US T-bills lost a notch of rating due to long-term declining
         | governance tied to the cozy relationship and revolving door
         | between Wall St. and federal regulators. This is a form of
         | corruption that undermines the economy and strategic power.
        
         | dragonwriter wrote:
         | > dollar is predicted to crash any time.
         | 
         | Clever use of passive voice but predicted _by whom_?
        
       | netcraft wrote:
       | I personally dont think 45$ per year is going to change habits
       | that much, especially for larger customers who have a lot of
       | public IPs.
        
         | lokar wrote:
         | Already a lot of discussion about this at my job. It's a lot of
         | $ at scale. We will put a bunch of work in to avoid the fee.
        
           | rblatz wrote:
           | At $45 a year per IP address you'd have to spend less than a
           | man hour per address to even conceivably approach break even.
           | 
           | And I normally would be worried if my company was focusing on
           | break even initiatives instead of higher impact ones.
        
             | wongarsu wrote:
             | But if you have 100 backend servers that mostly communicate
             | on the internal network/VPC and need their IPv4 mostly for
             | updates, it seems easy to justify standing up a proxy and
             | reconfiguring your template. At least if your engineers
             | aren't in Silicon Valley and thus don't cost you $400/h.
        
             | toast0 wrote:
             | Depends how many IPs you're using. If you're using 10, who
             | cares; if you're using 100, I dunno. If it's 1,000 or more,
             | that's real money you probably shouldn't be pissing away.
             | (OTOH, a lot of cloud spend is pissing away money, so
             | what's another $45k/year)
        
               | lokar wrote:
               | And at 100,000+ it's worth real engineering
        
             | Beached wrote:
             | you don't have to break even on implementation. you will
             | get billed every single year, so if you can have two dudes
             | solve this in 3 months, you can break even in 3 years and
             | every year after that you saved money
        
           | mrweasel wrote:
           | Some companies have been allocating a bunch of pointless IPv4
           | addresses and I think that's why AWS is doing this. A friend
           | of mine have reduced the number of IPv4 addresses his
           | employer uses by 80% (100+ IPs) in less than a week. That's a
           | huge saving, but those IPs should never have been allocated
           | to begin with.
        
         | foobarian wrote:
         | Huh, speaking of lots of public IPs, most of MIT's old class A
         | is now owned by Amazon :-(
         | 
         | NetRange: 18.32.0.0 - 18.255.255.255
        
           | Analemma_ wrote:
           | Why :-( ? There's no way MIT was using more than a tiny
           | fraction of that /8; now it's actually being put to real use,
           | and MIT probably got some money out of it. Everybody wins.
        
             | amluto wrote:
             | MIT _was_ using it. Not efficiently, but MIT sold addresses
             | that were in use at the time due to what appeared to be IT
             | ineptitude.
             | 
             | It was also shortsighted. It was a massive resource, MIT
             | presumably sold it for under $200M (I assume far under),
             | and now AWS plans to rent the addresses at a rate that will
             | be around $600M _per year_ if they manage to rent them all.
        
           | wmf wrote:
           | The market is working :-)
        
         | kiririn wrote:
         | Hobby customers can buy an entire VPS, complete with IPv4 to
         | tunnel through, for 1/4 that
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | Operyl wrote:
           | Hobby customers aren't using AWS, by and large. And it's only
           | a matter of time before we see more and more costs for IPv4
           | down in these tiers as well.
        
             | preommr wrote:
             | Counterpoint: My hobby projects all use AWS because that's
             | what I am familiar with, and they have the cheapest prices.
             | I also reuse a lot of resources like a database to further
             | save costs.
        
               | Aeolun wrote:
               | AWS have many things, but they most definitely do not
               | have the cheapest prices. Unless you are pricing in
               | convenience.
        
             | pnpnp wrote:
             | Totally disagree! :)
             | 
             | My monthly costs are minuscule with a reserved with a t4g
             | instance, Lambda, S3 and Cloudfront as my primary usage.
             | 
             | Honestly, it beats out the "budget" VPS providers I was
             | previously using, and is a heck of a lot more
             | powerful/reliable.
        
               | Operyl wrote:
               | I knew I'd get the counter points here on HN, but I'd
               | argue we're probably the exception here. AWS can be
               | really cheap, but it is easy for things to go wrong.
               | Bandwidth, commonly unmetered at places like OVH or
               | Hetzner, can cost a fortune at AWS if you get attacked.
               | And while AWS will refund you once or twice, after that
               | you're either left scared or on the hook eventually.
        
               | pnpnp wrote:
               | Absolutely! It just happens to be a good fit for me :)
               | 
               | I use very little bandwidth and processing with the vast
               | majority of my projects. In the even that I do need heavy
               | lifting for a couple hours, it still tends to be a pretty
               | minimal cost.
               | 
               | Now for sustained heavy loads/bandwidth... I definitely
               | would look elsewhere for hobby projects.
               | 
               | Edit: and I agree with your point about attacks. I have
               | pretty aggressive monitoring set up around billing.
        
             | voytec wrote:
             | > Hobby customers aren't using AWS
             | 
             | AWS has the easy to use Lightsail[1] VPS offer with
             | cheapest product at $3.5/mo but they'll likely increase
             | these prices as well, since there's an IPv4 address
             | included.
             | 
             | [1] https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/
        
               | rusl1 wrote:
               | I've got a 2GB ram 2 CPU for the same price on IONOS
        
           | znpy wrote:
           | Hobby provider most often are already charging for ipv4
           | addresses.
        
       | GabeIsko wrote:
       | They want people to use EIP right? Is this really a problem for
       | anything other than a device that cannot perform dns lookups.
        
       | decasia wrote:
       | So I have a tiny personal website hosted on ec2. Right now the
       | DNS points to the server's public IPv4 address. But I don't
       | really want to pay $40+/year for an IPv4 for my personal project.
       | 
       | Does anyone have experience switching a small personal site to
       | IPv6 only in 2023?
       | 
       | I'm guessing the vast majority of my (North American/European-
       | based) friends and visitors can probably connect just fine to an
       | IPv6 address. I wish I knew what percentage it is.
       | 
       | I guess I could add an AAAA record and check what percentage of
       | traffic actually uses it.
        
         | avereveard wrote:
         | How about removing the public IP and receiving connection from
         | cloudfront? Or have it hosted in apprunner. Then you cname your
         | domain to the services' domain, and skip the cost.
        
           | decasia wrote:
           | Yep I think that's plan B, thanks.
        
         | capableweb wrote:
         | According to Google
         | (https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html), 60% of
         | word-wide users wouldn't be able to visit your website.
         | 
         | In the US, it would be about ~50% of users, while in Europe
         | it's ranging from 30% (France) to 98% (Spain) who wouldn't be
         | able to visit the website.
         | 
         | But yeah, I'd do what you say in the bottom of your comment.
         | Add AAAA records and then see how many people uses ipv6
         | compared to ipv4 and then decide.
        
           | KAMSPioneer wrote:
           | I understand that Movistar, the largest Spanish ISP, is
           | currently deploying IPv6 in beta at the moment. I expect that
           | will trickle down to the various resellers of Movistar's
           | network shortly after. Hopefully that will get that 98% down
           | in the near future. :(
        
           | decasia wrote:
           | Sigh, so basically it's impossible to switch without
           | shredding an already tiny audience. I'm sure it won't be a
           | nice UX either to have a "can't connect to this IP" error in
           | someone's browser.
           | 
           | IPv6 has been around for so long now, I'm disappointed it
           | doesn't have a little bit higher adoption.
        
             | smileybarry wrote:
             | And if all else fails, you can put something like
             | Cloudflare in front of it to handle IPv4 traffic.
        
               | doublerabbit wrote:
               | Which than you're back to paying $40+/year to ensure you
               | don't get wiped from their "free" tier when they feel
               | like it.
               | 
               | Nothing is free forever.
        
       | amluto wrote:
       | > A new blog post shows you 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.
       | 
       | It would be nice if this came with reasonably priced NAT
       | gateways. The current pricing is outrageous.
        
         | brickteacup wrote:
         | Not to mention the absurd fact that accessing (IPv4) AWS APIs
         | from a private subnet requires paying for either a NAT gateway
         | or an interface endpoint (we got bitten by sending a ton of
         | Kinesis traffic through a NAT gateway once)
        
         | pnpnp wrote:
         | I completely agree. It's odd they would announce charging for
         | dedicated IPv4 while not having a free shared egress solution
         | (unless I'm misunderstanding).
         | 
         | I would expect them to reduce NAT pricing in the long run, but
         | who knows.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | SteveNuts wrote:
           | I'm shocked this isn't a feature of a VPC out of the box
           | (shared internet bound traffic). You should only need a NAT
           | gateway if you want the traffic to come out of a single set
           | of external IPs that you control.
           | 
           | Almost all of my use cases I could easily ride out to the
           | internet through a shared pipe (apt updates and such) and
           | don't care whatsoever what IP that exits the AWS network
           | from, since I'm not applying firewall rules or anything.
        
             | patmcc wrote:
             | >>> and don't care whatsoever what IP that exits the AWS
             | network from
             | 
             | You'll start to care pretty quickly if it's the same IP as
             | a bad actor that's blocked everywhere.
        
             | ishanjain28 wrote:
             | So for this, Run your apps in public subnets that are
             | attached to IGW.
        
           | ransackdev wrote:
           | I think that as a business and given the fact they are now
           | charging for a previously free service (public IPs), offering
           | a now paid service as free would nullify the reasons for
           | doing what they are doing. They don't owe anyone anything for
           | free.
        
             | inopinatus wrote:
             | That doesn't follow, because the reason is that IP
             | addresses are scarce.
        
         | hnav wrote:
         | You can stand up your own on top of a t3.micro or something if
         | you don't care too much about HA (e.g. you just wanna be able
         | to hit the internet when SSHed into your instances).
        
         | nodesocket wrote:
         | 100% agree, they need to offer steep reserved instance pricing
         | for NAT gateways. To deploy 3 NAT gateways (HA one in each
         | availability zone) is $99/mo just for the instances.
        
         | whalesalad wrote:
         | $40/mo is outrageous? We spend thousands a month on AWS and
         | drive most traffic thru a single NAT gateway. It's rock solid
         | and it "just works" without any fuss. Totally worth it.
        
           | mgaunard wrote:
           | Leasing an IPv4 is 0.40 per month. The 39.60 on top is just
           | their margin.
        
             | ishanjain28 wrote:
             | Where?
        
               | est31 wrote:
               | Exchange prices are still in that region, at least for
               | some RIRs: https://www.ipxo.com/market-stats/
        
           | paulddraper wrote:
           | For a lot of traffic $40 is not outrageous.
           | 
           | For a little traffic $40 is outrageous.
        
           | Dylan16807 wrote:
           | Most users are below 10Mbps average, so yes $480 per year is
           | a huge price for a fraction of a percent share of a router
           | (plus redundancy).
        
             | ishanjain28 wrote:
             | Okay and those users can easily use a much cheaper NAT
             | instance instead of managed NAT Gateways.
        
           | cdchn wrote:
           | There is where people usually start chiming in about how they
           | can run a VPS at Whatever Hosting and Waffles Inc. for $4/mo.
        
             | whalesalad wrote:
             | yep, and they should. aws has never really been suited to
             | the hobbyist. does it work for that? of course. is it most
             | cost effective? absolutely not. is it cost effective for
             | people who need the resources? yes.
        
               | Spivak wrote:
               | Yes it is which is why Lightsail exists. The whole mantra
               | of the cloud is only pay for what you need and scale down
               | to zero.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | otabdeveloper4 wrote:
               | > is it cost effective for people who need the resources?
               | yes.
               | 
               | There is no possible use case in no possible universe
               | where AWS is cost effective.
               | 
               | Renting the same compute resources wholesale will cost
               | you 20 times less. (Not a typo.)
        
               | finikytou wrote:
               | sure they became a multi billion dollar business by not
               | being cost effective
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | dijit wrote:
               | They became a multi-billion dollar business by:
               | 
               | A) Promising scale (and delivering to a certain extent)
               | 
               | B) being significantly more convenient than contemporary
               | solutions
               | 
               | C) becoming trendy
               | 
               | D) hoodwinking CxO's into the belief that not owning your
               | data is better for you, actually. (CapEx vs OpEx)
               | 
               | E) unfathomable amounts of DevRel.
               | 
               | Nobody has _ever_ claimed AWS was cost effective, they
               | have said that "it's worth the cost" though.
        
               | dmattia wrote:
               | I run a number of personal projects on AWS entirely on
               | their serverless offerings and pay $0 outside of domain
               | registration as I'm well within their free tiers. That
               | seems pretty cost effective.
        
               | AlchemistCamp wrote:
               | Yes, and for bandwidth, AWS is closer to 100x overpriced.
        
           | electroly wrote:
           | The expensive part of NAT Gateway is the $0.045/GB.
        
           | cj wrote:
           | Plus $0.045 per gigabyte of data that passes through it.
           | 
           | AWS has notoriously high egress fees.
        
             | CSSer wrote:
             | I ran into a SaaS company recently that had a guide for how
             | to setup a white-label domain using route 53 and Cloudfront
             | for one of their services. The SaaS company charges for
             | service bandwidth usage, and they host their infrastructure
             | on AWS, so if you opt to follow their guide they get a fat
             | margin bump in the form of avoiding an egress charge and
             | you get to be double-charged for bandwidth. You've gotta
             | love it.
        
             | dilyevsky wrote:
             | It's not just egress in case of NAT - they charge you 4.5c
             | per _processed_ GB which means in both directions. This
             | trips a lot of people up.
        
         | aednichols wrote:
         | NAT is pretty computationally intensive, this is why e.g. ISPs
         | & mobile carriers are pushing IPv6 over CGNAT.
        
           | NoZebra120vClip wrote:
           | For example, rather than simply routing IP packets and then
           | forgetting them, you need to statefully inspect every TCP
           | segment and every supposedly connectionless UDP conversation,
           | you need to maintain state for every live conversation, and
           | you need to mitigate DOS with all those resources.
           | 
           | At that point, you might as well be running a Layer 7
           | Firewall or an Intrusion Protection System.
        
             | tptacek wrote:
             | UDP is connectionless precisely so you can build novel
             | stateful protocols on it. There's no promise in UDP that
             | you'll be able to statelessly monitor it.
        
               | debugnik wrote:
               | Which is why game networking libraries put a lot of
               | emphasis on NAT traversal, forcing NATs to recognise the
               | "connection". And why game console manufacturers tell
               | users to just forward all incoming traffic unmanaged by
               | the NAT to the console.
        
               | colmmacc wrote:
               | UDP is actually more expensive to NAT than TCP is. The
               | reason is UDP fragmentation, which is my vote for the
               | worst, and least forgivable, design error of TCP/IP.
               | 
               | Instead of putting the fragmentation in L4 (like QUIC now
               | does) and including a UDP header on every fragmented
               | packet in a datagram, UDP only includes the header on the
               | first packet. With fragmentation happening; firewalls,
               | NATs, and end-hosts have to buffer and coalesce IP
               | packets based on IP IDs, before the destination can be
               | identified. It's a real nuisance. A lot of CGNAT
               | "stateless" implementations can't handle this and you get
               | very hard to debug issues when there are fragmentation
               | and MTU mismatches.
        
             | Bluecobra wrote:
             | > At that point, you might as well be running a Layer 7
             | Firewall or an Intrusion Protection System.
             | 
             | If you go down this path consider using Transit Gateway so
             | you can route multiple VPC traffic to a central security
             | VPC in a region. I've done this a Palo Alto VM and it seems
             | to work well.
        
           | amluto wrote:
           | AWS NAT gateway is $0.045 per hour plus $0.045 per GB. The
           | hourly fee seems mostly okay - for largish users, one or two
           | per region is fine.
           | 
           | $0.045 per GB is _nuts_. That's $20.25 /hour or $14580/mo for
           | 1 Gbps. One can buy a cheap gadget using very little power
           | that can NAT 1 Gbps at line rate for maybe $200 (being
           | generous). One can buy a perfectly nice low power server that
           | can NAT 10Gbps line rate for $1k with some compute to spare.
           | One can operate one of these systems, complete with a rack
           | and far more power than needed, _plus_ the Internet
           | connection, for a lot less money than $14580 /mo. (Never mind
           | that your $14580 doesn't actually cover the egress fee on
           | AWS.)
           | 
           | A company with a couple full time employees could easily
           | operate quite a few of these out of any normal datacenter,
           | charge AWS-like fees, and make a killing, without breaking a
           | sweat. But they wouldn't get many clients because most
           | datacenter customers already have a NAT-capable router and
           | don't need this service to begin with.
           | 
           | In other words, the OpEx associated with a service like this,
           | including the sysadmin time, is simply not in the ballpark of
           | what AWS charges.
        
             | ttt3ts wrote:
             | Bit confused. Couldn't you just run a Linux VM to do your
             | NAT and only pay normal egress?
        
               | deadmutex wrote:
               | > just run a Linux VM
               | 
               | + Run extra for failover, HA etc + manage security +
               | Monitor performance + ...
        
           | xxpor wrote:
           | It's not really computationally expensive, it's memory
           | expensive. You need per connection state.
        
             | blibble wrote:
             | it already has stateful firewall
             | 
             | so that's: source ip, dest ip, protocol, source port, dest
             | port, connection state (say 16 bytes total)
             | 
             | doing NAT too is what, 3 more bytes per connection (8 bits
             | for an offset into an IP table and 16 bits for the
             | translated port)
        
               | p1mrx wrote:
               | Generally an ISP does not have a stateful firewall prior
               | to deploying CGNAT.
        
               | dijit wrote:
               | NAT and Stateful firewalling are commonly bundled
               | together (especially on home systems) but I would not go
               | so far as to say "NAT has a stateful firewall"-
               | 
               | I hear such takes all the time and its really
               | frustrating; usually in threads regarding IPv6,
               | incidentally it is usually programmers who think they
               | understand everything about networks because they know
               | how tcp operates.
        
               | blibble wrote:
               | > but I would not go so far as to say "NAT has a stateful
               | firewall"-
               | 
               | > I hear such takes all the time and its really
               | frustrating
               | 
               | maybe you'd be less frustrated if you understood what
               | people were saying, because I didn't say that
               | 
               | AWS already do 1:1 NAT and there's additionally a
               | stateful firewall, which necessitates connection state
               | tracking
               | 
               | adding the extra few bytes to do port translation
               | shouldn't vastly increase the memory required
               | 
               | > incidentally it is usually programmers who think they
               | understand everything about networks because they know
               | how tcp operates.
               | 
               | from someone who has written a commercial packet filter:
               | in terms of complexity, TCP blows the preceding layers of
               | the stack out of the water
        
           | meragrin_ wrote:
           | > ISPs & mobile carriers are pushing IPv6 over CGNAT
           | 
           | LOL. Not Metronet. They are doubling down on CGNAT. They've
           | acquired ISPs with IPv6 and killed it in favor of CGNAT.
        
           | Spivak wrote:
           | This is missing the point mostly, my own sites have supported
           | ipv6 for a going on a decade because it was fun to get it
           | working. But that's a very different thing than supporting
           | _only_ IPv6.
        
             | p1mrx wrote:
             | It's best for an ISP to deploy IPv6 and CGNATv4 in
             | parallel, so the NAT only needs to handle traffic for
             | services that don't support IPv6 (e.g.
             | news.ycombinator.com)
        
         | secondcoming wrote:
         | Last time we used GCP's NAT gateway it was constantly dropping
         | SYN packets. We had to revert to using External IPs on machines
         | that talked to the wider internet.
        
       | wmf wrote:
       | Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36910855
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36910994
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36942424
        
         | metadat wrote:
         | Thanks! Macro-expanded:
         | 
         |  _AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you're going to pay_
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36942424 (3 days ago, 186
         | comments)
         | 
         |  _AWS Begins Charging for Public IPv4 Addresses_
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36910994 (6 days ago, 36
         | comments)
         | 
         |  _AWS Public IPv4 Address Charge and Public IP Insights_
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36910855 (6 days ago, 9
         | comments)
        
       | alberth wrote:
       | This was expected, and rent seeking.
       | 
       | AWS over the last decade has spent $ billions buying up ASN
       | blocks.
       | 
       | I've never been one to use the word "rent seeking", but owning
       | IPs is the ultimate rent seeking cloud business. Domain names can
       | change registries but if you own the underlining IP being used
       | (and there's a depleting supply of them) - it's a great business
       | to charge rents on.
       | 
       | https://www.techradar.com/news/amazon-has-hoarded-billions-o...
        
         | madsbuch wrote:
         | Most applications will be able to move to v6 eventually.
         | Hopefully moves like this will push that development.
        
           | andrewstuart2 wrote:
           | Even already, I think you can get away with doing almost
           | everything v6 with a much smaller number of ipv4s for legacy
           | traffic. I say that but still largely use v4 for everything,
           | so maybe I'm not one to talk.
        
             | pantalaimon wrote:
             | Unless you need to pull anything from GitHub...
        
               | kccqzy wrote:
               | Then direct your anger at Microsoft, not Amazon.
        
               | doublerabbit wrote:
               | Why not both?
               | 
               | Both are dominating the internet-cyberspace and both are
               | screwing it over for everyone else.
        
         | efitz wrote:
         | Looking at it a different way, IPv4 addresses are scarce so it
         | makes more economic sense to have fewer, central owners that
         | can maximize usage, rather than millions of individuals owners,
         | many or most of which would not necessarily be using them at
         | any given time.
         | 
         | Putting a price on IP address usage again is a mechanism to
         | prevent squatting/hoarding a scarce resource.
         | 
         | But if you don't want to "rent" IP addresses from anyone, you
         | can still find blocks for sale. Last time I checked (last year)
         | class C blocks were going for $15k-$20k.
        
           | efitz wrote:
           | BTW AWS specifically allows you to bring your own IP
           | addresses.
           | 
           | https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-byoi.
           | ..
        
         | yieldcrv wrote:
         | Most of the internet is rent seeking
         | 
         | VPNs just resell internet under a "more private than the next"
         | unverifiable claim, and hope they get enough sycophants
         | believing it
         | 
         | Most of YC this year resells access to ChatGPT
         | 
         | Its the game
        
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