AWS Public IPv4 Address Charge

AWS has started charging for public IPv4 addresses. Effective February 1, 2024 there will be a charge of $0.005 per IP per hour for all public IPv4 addresses, whether attached to a service or not (there is already a charge for public IPv4 addresses you allocate in your account but don\’t attach to an EC2 instance).

IPv4 addresses are an increasingly scarce resource and the cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years.

Expected changes

• 750 hours of public IPv4 address per month for first 12 months, as a part of EC2 free tier starting February 1, 2024.
• All EC2 Free Tier customers will be eligible for 750 hours of public IPv4 address per month for first 12 months.
• Customers will not incur charges for IP addresses they own and bring to the cloud using Amazon BYOIP.
• Lightsail will continue to offer bundles that include one public IPv4 address and IPv6 address. Revised prices for bundles that include a public IPv4 address will be effective on all new and existing Lightsail bundles starting May 1, 2024. Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/announcing-ipv6-instance-bundles-and-pricing-update-on-amazon-lightsail/

AWS is basically encouraging developers to starting considering IPv6 for their resources wherever possible.

Recommended changes

• If you're using public IP for the RDS, it's highly recommended to turn that off. Connect your RDS only via VPC from your EC2 instance, not via public internet. This will also improve your data security.
• If you want to enabled IPv6 communication through your NAT Gateway - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/nat-gateway-nat64-dns64.html
• Migrate your VPC from IPV4 to IPV6 - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-migrate-ipv6.html
• AWS Services that support IPV6 - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ipv6-support.html
• AWS IAM supports IPv6 addresses in IAM policies.
• Amazon Cognito supports IPv6 addresses in IP address exceptions.
• AWS CLI v2 supports download over IPv6 connections for IPv6-only clients.

Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM)

Public IP insights shows you all public IPv4 addresses used by services. You can use these insights to identify IP address usage and recommendations to release unused IPs.

Do note that IPAM also has an Advanced Tier with additional cost. As they say, cloud is not cheap, sometimes even to save cost, you have to pay for that.