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So, the world is finally out of IPv4 addresses. It's been expected at least since I've been to college in 2004.

But how is it that AWS have so much of this precious product, that they can give them away for free with every EC2 instance (free as long as they are in use)?

I would expect Amazon to provide IPv6 addresses for free and charge some kind of premium for the IPv4 addresses it has left.

noamtm
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They bought address space.

AWS finds it is worthwhile to provide customers cloud from anywhere with an v4 Internet connection by default. 30 million IPs, looking at AS16509.

It is not free. Unused Elastic IPs have costs. And total cloud spend is substantial. Overall, AWS's Q3 2019 operating income was $2.55 billion.

Out of a company that makes billions per year in profits, dropping a few millions on buying sort-of contiguous v4 space at a premium is pocket change. As an infrastructure provider, they have the incentive to enable their customers to provide v4 services. Long after enterprises resell their address space, and residential ISPs move to v6 and NAT44.

John Mahowald
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  • As I wrote -- free as long as they're in use :-). But I see your point -- they have so many of them (0.8% of the world's IPv4 addresses, by your answer and https://stackoverflow.com/a/2437185/38557). – noamtm Dec 09 '19 at 22:00