AWS to charge for IPv4 addresses

Amazon Web Services will charge for public-facing Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses for all services, starting February 1 next year.

The cost will be US$0.005 per address, and applies to Elastic Compute Cloud, Relational Database Service instances, Elastic Kubernetes Service nodes and others, in all AWS regions, the cloud giant said.

There will be no charge for customers' own IPv4 addresses used for AWS, and the EC2 Free Tier will have 750 hours of public address usage per month without charges for the first 12 months.

Introduced with the original Internet, IPv4 address blocks around the world have been exhausted for several years now, with no new allocations possible from the 32-bit range.

To explain the new charge, AWS said acquiring IPv4 addressses has become over three times more expensive over the past five 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 modernisation and conservation measure," AWS said.

Apart from encouraging customers to use the newer and far larger IPv6 protocol, with 128 bits address space, AWS will from now on start to report IPv4 usage in the Cost and Usage reports.

AWS has also added a new feature, Public IP Insights, to the VPC IP Address Manager, to help customers make more efficient use of the older protocol, and to provide a better understanding of their security profiles.