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AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

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Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#261

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...

These arguments always boil down to these two: "Please just try to fit more than 4 billion numbers into 4 bytes" -- this is mathematically impossible. "Just extend the address size" -- this is an entirely new protocol by the definition of IPv4, which uses fixed-size addresses. The reason for the slow IPv6 adoption is that there was no financial or business pressure. While IPv4 is ubiquitous, nobody individually feels…

Everyone is always quick to complain that we're going through N number of NAT gateways or N number of proxies, but this is virtually never a problem for most of the Internet. Even despite this rats maze of proxies and NAT gateways we're still supporting virtually all the applications that consumers use and love such as VoIP, WebRTC, HTTP(S), DNS, Gaming, Streaming Video, Mobile Apps, etc.

NAT seems to always get a bad rep because it inconveniences the very few that want to have an end to end experience, but there has to be some sacrifice to keep the Internet running for the billions of users.

NAT and by extension CGNAT are the unsung heroes of the Internet.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say ipv6 was supposed to get rid of NAT. Can you explain why it doesn't? You then say the problem was built into ipv6 from the start. From looking it up it looks like it's mostly required when IP's change (e.g. when you change ISP), which for me is more of an argument to use DNS if you want fixed addresses.

One reason could be the proliferation of prefix delegation, meaning an ISP now controls the numbering of your internal network, and it keeps constantly changing the net block, so you can never get stable local addressing… so you just keep running dual stack or try to use nat66 with a ULA network as a kludge or something.

You can have multiple IPv6 addresses on your interface, so you can have both the ULA address for internal use as well as the global address - no need for NAT

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#263

GitHub.com still doesn't support IPv6. I know that there is some work going on to support it, but this shows that it is far from trivial.

This is one of the reasons why I'm trying to avoid Github these days. If they can't get something as simple as IPv6 to work, I don't have much faith in the test of their backend either.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#264
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say ipv6 was supposed to get rid of NAT. Can you explain why it doesn't? You then say the problem was built into ipv6 from the start. From looking it up it looks like it's mostly required when IP's change (e.g. when you change ISP), which for me is more of an argument to use DNS if you want fixed addresses.

The existence of NAT66 and NPTv6 are proof that there is still a need for NAT in an ipv6 environment. Maybe not in your environment, but people wouldn't make these solutions if there wasn't a need.

> The existence of NAT66 and NPTv6 are proof that there is still a need for NAT in an ipv6 environment

The existence of fridges with twitter integration proves that there is a need to a Lettice to tweet.

There are all kinds of things that exist, steam-powered motorbike among them. Not all of them exist for the right reasons.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#265
post #120
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.

I suppose a sufficiently motivated individual could look at something like Shodan, see how many of those IP addresses AWS owns are active (and fudge it by some factor to account for how many of those IP addresses are used by AWS themselves) and multiply it by their new IP address billing.

No need to use Shodan. AWS already publishes the IPv4 address it owns in JSON from a well-known endpoint [0].

[0]: https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These arguments always boil down to these two: "Please just try to fit more than 4 billion numbers into 4 bytes" -- this is mathematically impossible. "Just extend the address size" -- this is an entirely new protocol by the definition of IPv4, which uses fixed-size addresses. The reason for the slow IPv6 adoption is that there was no financial or business pressure. While IPv4 is ubiquitous, nobody individually feels…

There was a third option: make the existing IPv4 space a hierarchically routed island of the new IPv4.1 space, with backwards compatible packet format, then upgrade just the endpoints in the first phase. So every owner of a ipv4 would get, say, an entire 32 bit space that routes over existing IPv4 infrastructure . So, if the endpoints are upgraded, you have guaranteed end-to-end deliverability without silly hacks suc…

>”So every owner of a ipv4 would get, say, an entire 32 bit space that routes over existing IPv4 infrastructure.”

So… NAT.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#268

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...

Absolutely this. IPv6 is when engineering doesn't face reality and operates on "we know better" standards, when they actually don't know better.

I actually feel antagonist towards the designers for it.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason could be the proliferation of prefix delegation, meaning an ISP now controls the numbering of your internal network, and it keeps constantly changing the net block, so you can never get stable local addressing… so you just keep running dual stack or try to use nat66 with a ULA network as a kludge or something.

You can have multiple IPv6 addresses on your interface, so you can have both the ULA address for internal use as well as the global address - no need for NAT

Source address selection for multiple non-loopback addresses was (maybe still is?) notoriously bad in many OS’s for years.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These arguments always boil down to these two: "Please just try to fit more than 4 billion numbers into 4 bytes" -- this is mathematically impossible. "Just extend the address size" -- this is an entirely new protocol by the definition of IPv4, which uses fixed-size addresses. The reason for the slow IPv6 adoption is that there was no financial or business pressure. While IPv4 is ubiquitous, nobody individually feels…

Everyone is always quick to complain that we're going through N number of NAT gateways or N number of proxies, but this is virtually never a problem for most of the Internet. Even despite this rats maze of proxies and NAT gateways we're still supporting virtually all the applications that consumers use and love such as VoIP, WebRTC, HTTP(S), DNS, Gaming, Streaming Video, Mobile Apps, etc. NAT seems to always get a ba…

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