This is the only way IPv6 will ever finally take off; if there's a cost to IPv4.
AWS is estimated to make $400M to $1B with the new IPv4 charge
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Re: AWS is estimated to make $400M to $1B with the new IPv4 charge
#12> So the approximate value of Amazon's IPv4 estate today is about: $4.6 Billion dollars! > AWS will likely make anywhere between $400 Million and $1 Billion dollars a year with this new IPv4 charge! In other words, it's not clear AWS is "making" anything at all. It might take them over 10 years to pay back the cost of what it would take to acquire them today. Now I assume Amazon is making some level of profit on them…
The IPv4 space almost certainly did not cost them $4.6 billion to acquire. They acquired it much cheaper, and they can’t reasonably sell it because they need it for users. So charging for it when they previously did not nets them revenue they were leaving on the floor before.
Re: AWS is estimated to make $400M to $1B with the new IPv4 charge
#13What's interesting to me is that they always had this cost, but in the past it was always baked into the cost of anything that used a public IP (namely EC2). The prices for IPv4 addresses finally got so high that they had to break it out into a separate charge because otherwise it would be too much to bake into the cost of everything. I also completely believe them when they say they are doing it to force people to b…
> And of course it's a great way to get people to move to IPv6, since those are still "free" (in quotes because those prices are still baked into the things that support them).
They are basically free because there is no shortage of them.
Re: AWS is estimated to make $400M to $1B with the new IPv4 charge
#14What's interesting to me is that they always had this cost, but in the past it was always baked into the cost of anything that used a public IP (namely EC2). The prices for IPv4 addresses finally got so high that they had to break it out into a separate charge because otherwise it would be too much to bake into the cost of everything. I also completely believe them when they say they are doing it to force people to b…
> And of course it's a great way to get people to move to IPv6, since those are still "free" (in quotes because those prices are still baked into the things that support them). They are basically free because there is no shortage of them.
The costs to AWS are having to upgrade all their routers and any other equipment that handles IP (including the management cards in each physical host).
Re: AWS is estimated to make $400M to $1B with the new IPv4 charge
#15What's really offensive about this is that AWS does not have good enough IPv6 support for most customers to migrate off of IPv4, even if they want to.
ALB uses 2-4 IPv4 addresses. It supports dualstack, but not IPv6-only.
CloudFront does not support IPv6 origins.
All APIs except for a handful are IPv4-only, so you either need a VPC endpoint (priced per month per AZ per API) or an IPv4 address to communicate with them.
It frustrates me that I'll be paying for a bunch of IPv4 addresses that I don't need for any business reason, I only have them because they're necessary within the AWS ecosystem.
Re: AWS is estimated to make $400M to $1B with the new IPv4 charge
#16Jeez. Eventually someone is going to break down and invent a new IP solution that doubles the number of addresses that we have now. I mean if I were doing it, I'd probably make it more like 1,028 times bigger but maybe it would present as hubris. Addresses would be so plentiful they'd basically be free. And since I am using magic to do all of this, I'd invent it over 20 years ago, so that it'd have been decades since…
That's awesome. I have no doubt you would use common sense and make the addresses in this new system simple, recognizable, and just an extended version of what everybody is already used to, like 111.222.33.44.55.66
Re: AWS is estimated to make $400M to $1B with the new IPv4 charge
#17Jeez. Eventually someone is going to break down and invent a new IP solution that doubles the number of addresses that we have now. I mean if I were doing it, I'd probably make it more like 1,028 times bigger but maybe it would present as hubris. Addresses would be so plentiful they'd basically be free. And since I am using magic to do all of this, I'd invent it over 20 years ago, so that it'd have been decades since…
IPv5 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx for the win! /s
Tbh not sure why the protocol couldn't be upgraded so that xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx and xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx are all accepted. Seems a monumentally shite oversight to not be like that. I mean it's a freaking telephone book address system. Astounding they baked it in just xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and didn't upgrade the protocol at all in the last 20 years (is this just entirely due to profit/asset protecting?).
Response was to make a wholly new protocol when they could have just updated the standard and forced suppliers to patch updates?
USB backwards compatability that shiz. The fact I can take a modern usb device and plug it in a 1.1 gen port and it still just works. Why the hell isn't ipv4 like that for upgrades?
Seriously is there any real technical hurdle why we didn't do it this way?
Re: AWS is estimated to make $400M to $1B with the new IPv4 charge
#18> So the approximate value of Amazon's IPv4 estate today is about: $4.6 Billion dollars! > AWS will likely make anywhere between $400 Million and $1 Billion dollars a year with this new IPv4 charge! In other words, it's not clear AWS is "making" anything at all. It might take them over 10 years to pay back the cost of what it would take to acquire them today. Now I assume Amazon is making some level of profit on them…
They already own those IPs and there is no ongoing fee to keep owning them. So everything they make is profit since they costs have already been accounted for.
Like if you already owned a piece of land and let people rent houses on the land, and now you're charging them extra rent per square foot of land. You already own the land, so it's pure profit, because before you were including the cost of land in the houses. But of course the metaphor breaks down because at AWS you can move to IPv6 to avoid the cost, but you can't move the house off the land.
Re: AWS is estimated to make $400M to $1B with the new IPv4 charge
#19Jeez. Eventually someone is going to break down and invent a new IP solution that doubles the number of addresses that we have now. I mean if I were doing it, I'd probably make it more like 1,028 times bigger but maybe it would present as hubris. Addresses would be so plentiful they'd basically be free. And since I am using magic to do all of this, I'd invent it over 20 years ago, so that it'd have been decades since…
That's awesome. I have no doubt you would use common sense and make the addresses in this new system simple, recognizable, and just an extended version of what everybody is already used to, like 111.222.33.44.55.66
This right here was the biggest mistake for IPv6. Adoption would have been so much easier if IP6s were just "extra numbers" tacked onto the end so that if an old router saw it, it would ignore the extra bits and send it to the "IPv4" part of the address.
Re: AWS is estimated to make $400M to $1B with the new IPv4 charge
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And of course it's a great way to get people to move to IPv6, since those are still "free" (in quotes because those prices are still baked into the things that support them). They are basically free because there is no shortage of them.
The costs to AWS are having to upgrade all their routers and any other equipment that handles IP (including the management cards in each physical host).
Surely by now all of their equipment can support IPv6 with at most a firmware upgrade?