Live data from Hacker News

AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

toonk.io

101–110 of 480 posts

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#101
post #65

Question for the networking folk here. How can the rest of us help move things over to ipv6?

There's no reason for the 'rest of us' to do anything. Prices will move enough users out to ipv6 so that the ipv4 market will always be in equilibrium. Due to particular reasons (specific design of ipv6, human population maxing out at about 10bil, main users getting their own ipv4 addresses already) ipv4 will never entirely go away - which is not something we should care about.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#102
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://labs.ripe.net/author/franz/pollution-in-18/

That’s pretty cool. I’d never though about bogons and debogonizing before, it’s like chasing off all the squatters on your property and more keep coming. You need some fat pipes and beefy servers to be able to handle all the bogus traffic of machines trying to hit your server, and also be able to actually fulfill your purpose. Make sense now why Cloudflare would be one of the only companies that could handle it!

They only had a 10mbit link. Apparently 50mbit/s was the amount of traffic they received.

Mostly everyone could handle this, not just CloudFlare.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to go back further in time and hit the designers of IPv4 on the head for not making it forward compatible. IPv6 is as backward compatible as is possible within this constraint. You can embed IPv4 space within IPv6, there is NAT64, tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 and many other transition technologies. It's not possible to design a protocol that is any more backwards-compatible.

Vint Cerf has called the decision of it being 32 bits as silly and arbitrary, like having a car odometer with 40 digits. If he had pushed for more, he thought nobody would have taken him seriously. The idea of 32 becoming scarce was laughable. Also the complaint about ipv6 isn't a technical one, it's a usability one. Extending it to 48 bits would have been easy enough for people - like international calling. Those 16…

Only network engineers should see or care about IP addresses. The fact IPv6 addresses use colons is why people don't use IPv6 is the worst take I've ever heard.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#105

Can we go back in time and hit the designers of IPv6 upside the head? The decision not to make IPv6 backwards compatible, the belief that a beautiful new standard could magically replace something already so widespread... "Naive" is an inadequate word. We are still futzing with the transition 3 decades later, with no end in sight. Grrr, grumble...

You have to go back further in time and hit the designers of IPv4 on the head for not making it forward compatible. IPv6 is as backward compatible as is possible within this constraint. You can embed IPv4 space within IPv6, there is NAT64, tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 and many other transition technologies. It's not possible to design a protocol that is any more backwards-compatible.

> IPv6 is as backward compatible as is possible within this constraint.

Yikes, couldn't disagree with that more. There are a ton of things that ipv6 designers could have done to make the transition much easier. This is a (now quite old) blog post that is my "go to" that explains a lot of the problems with ipv6: https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

FWIW I couldn't find the link to that post until finding it on one of the comments here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894933 . That whole thread has lots of good commentary.

I still don't understand how people can defend ipv6. I remember the "we better get ready to switch to ipv6" noise a quarter century ago when I started my career. And yet we're still talking about how v4 addresses are worth billions. Ipv6 has been an unmitigated disaster. The original architects should have "the perfect is the enemy of the good" forcibly tattooed on their foreheads.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#106
post #96
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a fan of ipv6 evangelizing, much less at this point. Just give it up.

What is your solution?

Not OP nor a recognised network expert but here is my suggestion:

IPv10. The next IP version number that is unassigned, that is conveniently 4+6.

Basically something that is not breaking compatibility with IPv4 and doesn’t require those dual network stacks nonsense.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#107
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vint Cerf has called the decision of it being 32 bits as silly and arbitrary, like having a car odometer with 40 digits. If he had pushed for more, he thought nobody would have taken him seriously. The idea of 32 becoming scarce was laughable. Also the complaint about ipv6 isn't a technical one, it's a usability one. Extending it to 48 bits would have been easy enough for people - like international calling. Those 16…

Only network engineers should see or care about IP addresses. The fact IPv6 addresses use colons is why people don't use IPv6 is the worst take I've ever heard.

you've /never/ heard anyone call ipv6 long, confusing, and complicated? I've basically /only/ heard people say that.

This is probably because the idealized world of "only network engineers" is leaky. Programmers, sysadmins, people trying to get their network printer to work, non-specialists have to interface with network addresses constantly.

Saying they shouldn't is not a description of reality. Not everyone who needs to set up or diagnose a network do so as a career path.

Almost all hardware and software has supported ipv6 for many many years. The humans using it are the ones that shut it off or disable it. Unless you address the human behavior of why that is, this problem will not be addressed.

I claim there needs to be a friendlier, casual interface that makes people's lives easier. It can be a crude kneecapped sheen so long as it addresses the needs of the general user. Then they'll use ipv6, not for ideology or virtue reasons about the commons but because it makes their lives easier

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#108
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vint Cerf has called the decision of it being 32 bits as silly and arbitrary, like having a car odometer with 40 digits. If he had pushed for more, he thought nobody would have taken him seriously. The idea of 32 becoming scarce was laughable. Also the complaint about ipv6 isn't a technical one, it's a usability one. Extending it to 48 bits would have been easy enough for people - like international calling. Those 16…

Only network engineers should see or care about IP addresses. The fact IPv6 addresses use colons is why people don't use IPv6 is the worst take I've ever heard.

Network engineers are the one making the transition (or not).

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#109
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually went through this process with ARIN. So I can give you that perspective. It wasn't a big deal, the only minor concern I had was it felt like you're encouraged to sign up under a business entity. I had an LLC, so it was natural just to use that. I don't know what kind of vetting they do if you decide to use yourself as an organization though instead of a different legal entity. You need to provide justifica…

I'm curious if one were to be certain nation state and was happy being a completely isolated intranet, that they would just exit such arin or related associations and just create their own governing body of IP allocations? In such a case such an internet would be a completely separate internet right? I wonder if sanctions may ever apply to the internet itself and we may see a break up of the internet into regional in…

They could just use CGNAT and could get pretty far on that alone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#110
post #2

correct, direct url is https://toonk.io/aws-ipv4-estate-now-worth-4-5-billion/index... More interestingly, perhaps, is a forward look at how much new revenue AWS will generate once AWS starts charging ($44 per IP per year) as of 2024. I think it's not unlikely that AWS will generate a few hundred million to a billion in additional revenue with this new charge.

Hetzner charges 2€ per month or so for a v4 address already (optional of course).

That is for dedicated servers and additional IPs. The first on a VPS is 0,60€
Post reply on HN