Incoming ranty “Amazon sucks” post: AWS made $7.17 billion in Operating Income (revenue minus operating expenses) in Q4 2023 (up from $6.98 billion in Q3). They just added $15 onto my monthly bill (about $7.50 per public IPv4 per month) because “public IPv4s are running out”… or, just maybe, it’s because they want more money?
See, the reason I don’t trust their explanation is because it’s literally impossible for me to use some of their flagship services (e.g., load-balancing, ECS) without using IPv4 comms. They don’t support running IPv6-only, despite services like Cloudflare being totally fine proxying IPv6 & IPv4 traffic to it. If a lack of IPv4 addresses is the real reason for the price hike, shouldn’t they be spending some of those billions to support IPv6 properly?
It turns out that AWS has been planning to make this change since July last year. I only found out the other day when some of my billing alerts went off. Serves me right for not being a dedicated enough AWS blog reader I suppose 🤷🤦 But also, is this really a good way to notify your customers about a pretty important change? I get so many silly “come to our conference” or “some database certificate that doesn’t matter to your setup might expire in 2025” emails, but “hey, next more your bill will go up by $15” is probably something I actually care about.
So what does this mean to you? Or more importantly what can you do about it? Well, in my opinion, not very much right now. This $15 increase is unavoidable if you want to use an ALB (regardless of IPv4/IPv6), and depending on your setup it might be a lot more than $15. To some this might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, to others it might just be a drop in the ocean. For me personally, it’s annoying enough that I’m starting to look into how I might move my setup to other providers. I won’t be rushing there immediately, but I’d be surprised if I’m still using purely AWS by the end of the year.
Turns out this “cloud-agnostic” idea might not have been overkill after all. First they come for our IPs, next we’ll be paying for subnets 😢