I know at least one company that, after complaining bitterly over the weekend, freed up more than 50% of their IPv4 addresses today after a quick audit and change.
Seeing something like that makes me think that AWS is completely justified in bumping the price on IPv4 addresses. People used IPv4 indiscriminately and didn't care because AWS ensured that their customers would always have enough addresses available.
Not exactly. Most of the AWS services you can't release the IPv4 addresses. You automagically get 3 IPv4 addresses assigned to you when you create a load-balancer, even if you want that load-balancer to be IPv6 only.
And their native support for IPv6 within their services are hit-and-miss at best.
Yeah, this is my only real complaint with this. Internally their IPv6 support is pretty garbage, which is kind of fine since your internals shouldn't be exposed externally anyways, so it's in theory possible to have an internal IPv4 network that exposes traffic over IPv6 to the public using something like a load balancer.
Load balancers are already somewhat expensive- the base cost for each load balancer is already $16.43 a month before bandwidth. Three IP addresses, 12 cents per day each, over 30 days is another $10.80 a month. In other words load balancers just had their base price increase by 65%.
Sounds like they will end up with some pressure to get IPv6 working correctly if any of their customers are capable of pressure.. If they don't get it working now then it is definitely time to run away from their platform while you can still afford the fees to get out.
Seeing something like that makes me think that AWS is completely justified in bumping the price on IPv4 addresses. People used IPv4 indiscriminately and didn't care because AWS ensured that their customers would always have enough addresses available.