Starting February 1, 2024, Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced a new charge for public IPv4 addresses across all its services and regions. The charge is $0.005 per hour, for each public IPv4 address, whether in use or not. This decision reflects the increasing scarcity and rising acquisition costs of IPv4 addresses, aiming to encourage more efficient use and the transition to IPv6.
The charge applies to various AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and others that can have a public IPv4 address allocated and attached. The AWS Free Tier for EC2 has been updated to include 750 hours of public IPv4 address usage per month for the first 12 months, effective from February 1, 2024. Beyond this allowance, the standard charge applies. However, IP addresses that customers own and bring to AWS using Amazon’s Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) feature will not incur this charge.
AWS has also introduced Public IP Insights, a new feature of Amazon VPC IP Address Manager, to help customers monitor, analyze, and audit their use of public IPv4 addresses at no additional cost. This tool aims to provide a better understanding of security profiles, usage breakdowns, and optimization opportunities for public IPv4 addresses.
To mitigate the impact of these charges and encourage the adoption of IPv6, AWS has provided resources and guidance on using IPv6 with widely used services such as EC2, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), EKS, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon RDS. These resources include dual-stack IPv6 architectures and reference architectures for using IPv6 in AWS and hybrid networks.
In summary, AWS’s new charge for public IPv4 addresses is a strategic move to address the scarcity of IPv4 addresses, encourage efficient usage, and accelerate the transition to IPv6. Customers are encouraged to review their public IPv4 address usage, consider adopting IPv6, and utilize the Public IP Insights tool for optimization.
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