Amazon finds $1B jackpot in its 100 million+ IPv4 address stockpile | The tech giant has cited ballooning costs associated with IPv4 addresses

All it takes is one big company like Amazon changing their services to IPv6-only and most of the world would be converted over in a month or two... but now I guess we know the reason WHY Amazon doesn't push such a policy.

A massive swathe of current gen devices don't even support it.
It won't be a month.
Microsoft announce changes much smaller than that 4 years out and still have to give extensions.
- Seriously? How can any device call themselves current gen and not support something as basic as this? That's just embarrassing.
- Like what though?
  The last thing I have that doesn't support ipv4 from the hardware level is my Nintendo DS.
  Everything else has the hardware capability, it's just never used or enabled in the software by default.
It would be a good start if AWS supported IPv6 on all their services in the first place. Everything enters through CloudFront so I don't need any IPv4. But AWS's own services don't have IPv6 in every region, so I still have to provision NAT gateways.
- Yikes. I get free IPv6 for my servers through Hurricane Electric since my ISP doesn't provide it yet, I wonder if their service also works on AWS? I mean come on, if someone like Comcast can figure it out, why is it so hard for a major player like Amazon?

I remember doing an IT course over a decade ago and learning about IPv6 taking over, honestly surprised it hasn't yet. I just looked it up and apparently they came up with it in 1998. How is it taking so long? Is there some technical reason it's harder or something? Does the extra address size mean a not so great trade off in traffic or something?

note: I did study a bit of networking and IT but have forgotten everything mostly and work in a different field, thus my ignorance.

IPv6 is here, and has been for a long time. But if, for example, your web or email server can only be reached over IPv6 some people will not be able to load the site or send emails to you.
The entire internet is configured to work with IPv4. Some of the internet (less than a quarter) is also configured to also work with IPv6.
Imagine if your home had two driveways on different streets. Do you tell everyone both addresses, or do you pick one of them? Probably just one right? Now imagine if the second address can only be reached if someone has an off road capable vehicle. And you don't know what vehicle someone has - which address would you give them? Is it even worth having two driveways?
That's the situation we're in. IPv4 support is required and works perfectly. IPv6 is optional and doesn't always work.
- IPv4 support is required and works perfectly.
  Except it doesn't work perfectly, because it has a relatively small address space. That's why ipv6 exists.
- “Luckily” we are reaching the point where IPv4 just isn’t going to be fiscally sustainable for the majority of companies, meaning the push to IPv6 will be hastened.
  Though I don’t pretend it isn’t going to be a hell of a ride.
There are huge gaps in ipv6 adoption which means most users and services must continue to support and use ipv4.
Since everyone has to continue ipv4 support, there's not much motivation to push general adoption of ipv6. Maintaining dual stack support has its own costs.
Even within AWS, many of their services still don't support ipv6. AWS fees for ipv4 addressing may end up being a comparatively big driver for adoption.
- Even within AWS, many of their services still don't support ipv6. AWS fees for ipv4 addressing may end up being a comparatively big driver for adoption.
  You just outlined a reason for AWS not to fully support IPv6 as well.
In addition to what the other commented said, a lot of sys and net admins really don't like the idea of every lan device being globally addressable, while there's ways around it, a standard ipv4 Nat is a safety blanket to a lot of admins... Not that it should be like that, just my observation.
- a lot of sys and net admins really don’t like the idea of every lan device being globally addressable
  Those admins don't know what they're talking about. IPv6 has a region of the address space that can only be reached locally - similar to the 192.168.x.x space in IPv4. The only difference is it's really big (way bigger than the entire IPv4 space).
  As for NAT... there's nothing stopping you from using it with IPv6. It's often unnecessary, but if you disagree you can use it. And in practice NAT is often part of the transition process to IPv6 - my cell network carrier for example gives my phone an IPv6 address on their internal network but routes all my traffic to the regular internet via IPv4. They are using NAT to do that. If you try to ping my phone's IPv6 address, it won't reach my phone.
- They need to stop that nonsense. NAT is not for security, and was not designed for security purposes. In fact, there are a few ways it subverts security, such as SNI in TLS making the connection less private than it could be.
  If they want to block external connections, a border firewall can do the job just fine without NAT. It's arguably better, because NAT complicates existing firewall rules and their implementation in code. Complications are the enemy of security.
How is it taking so long?
It's more complicated and v4 is already there. That was the reasoning and it hasn't changed even though by now it should have.
To add to what others have said, I've heard that wide adoption of NATing as a standard practice basically ensured IPv4 longevity well beyond its logical end. This along with the cost to fully upgrade a network to IPv6 meant there was no financial incentive for companies to adopt it.
With Amazon starting to charge for IPv4 addresses, it won't be long before Google and Microsoft do the same with GCP and Azure. This may be the financial kick in the ass to get large enterprise environments to finally commit to IPv6.
- Financial incentive does exist, but the problem is that it's a tragedy of the commons. Me upgrading only makes sense if everything else is also upgraded. Until then, it makes sense for me not to spend anything. However, everyone else is making exactly that same calculation.
  ISPs have a lot of trouble managing IPv4. How much so depends on when you got your allocations. The first ISPs in the US got tons. The ones that grew out in other countries had to pick over the scraps. Even later US ISPs, particularly mobile carriers, got hit just as hard.
  Those later arrivals have to implement Carrier Grade NAT, where all traffic goes through a small set of IPv4 addresses. Sometimes, it's multiple layers of NAT. It takes extra equipment and network design to support all this, which in turn affects speed, reliability, and cost.
Even tough IPv6 is technically superior to IPv4 for the network operator it doesn't have clear benefits for home users.
Having global addresses instead of NAT means less control over your LAN and these unique public addresses can track users more accurately.
- Having global addresses instead of NAT means less control over your LAN
  You can still have internal IP addresses and things like the router firewall work pretty much like they always have. I'm not sure what you mean by less control really.
  these unique public addresses can track users more accurately
  I feel like that concern is overblown. You get way more information from DNS, for way cheaper, than you get from "there were 27 devices, now there are 28!" and both takes being the ISP and observing the traffic.
  It's also not like VPNs can't work in IPv6 land for people that really are conscious of hiding as much information about what they're doing from their ISP as possible.
- is there any reason why we can't still use NAT with IPv6? it seems like that would solve at least some of the problems.
I'm still trying to figure out good nftables rules for ipv6 prefix delegation...

From the article, 79 million IPv4 addresses, 0.005/hour($3.60/month), and an estimated 30% utilisation. $85m per month, $1bn/y.

It kinda also sets a new standard price for IPV4 addresses. I'm looking forward to the day that IPV6 (or translation) is commonplace enough that things can be run V6 only.

I've given up on the IPv6 transition happening in my lifetime.
From the article, 79 million IPv4 addresses
So that's how many IPv4 addresses Amazon has? For comparison, if I ask my server provider nicely they will give me a huge block of IPv6 addresses. For free. The largest block they will give a single customer (again, for free) is a /56 block which is 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 IP addresses.
To give you an idea how big that is... if I had ten billion customers, I could allocate several hundred billion unique IP addresses to each customer. And that's just with a section of the IPv6 address space that networks will hand out for free.

Many, many years ago, long before AWS was ever a thing, I posted on Slashdot about how there are problems with the IPv6 rollout. Basically that it should have been aggressively done in the 90s as a simple increase in address length and not try to fix every goddamn thing wrong with IPv4. Not doing that meant being stuck in a decades long rut with adaptation.

Someone accused me of being a shill for the telecom industry who wanted to profit off the shortage of IPv4 address space. I mentioned this to someone who I consider the smartest networking guy I know, and he thought that was dumb as hell. IPv4 causes more headaches than it's worth for those telecom companies to try to astroturf Slashdot or anywhere else.

And yet, now we're here with Amazon actually making good on the premise, if not the actual astroturfing (yet).

customers will pay $0.005 per public IPv4 address per hour

That works out to $43.80 per year ($43.92 if it’s a leap year).

today's average IPv4 price tag [is] $35

Seems like AWS’s IPv4 pricing is a bit of a rip-off. Not that there’s much of an alternative for anyone who isn’t able to buy an entire block, though.

The scary part about this, outside of amazon, is the fact that I actually understand some of the technical stuff being said in the comments.

One of us!

For instance, this old blog post from Meta (Facebook back then) claimed IPv6 optimizations accelerated their site by 10-15%

How the hell does the addressing system improve a sites performance by 10-15%??? That's crazy!

Also - Maybe I Should read that blog post lol

IPv6 fixed quite a lot of shite from IPv4