When planning to move your workloads to a public cloud you might want to consider the minor detail of public IPv4 connectivity (I know of at least one public cloud venture that couldn’t get their business off the ground because they couldn’t get enough public IPv4 addresses).

Here’s a question along these lines that one of the attendees of our public cloud networking course sent me:

I’m worried about the possibility of the exhaustion of public IPv4 addresses by Microsoft. I heard about the huge contract Microsoft has made with the US government, meaning more hosts, more customers, and more public IPv4 addresses needed by those customers. Have you heard about the same concern from other people working with Azure, AWS or Google Cloud?

I wouldn’t be worried. IPv4 address trading is becoming a stable market with slowly-rising prices reflecting resource scarcity. I’m positive that (A) the public cloud vendors have enough money to get whatever addresses they need and (B) they will be more than happy to pass the increased prices of IPv4 addresses to the customers who still refuse to learn to spell IPv6.

For more details on IPv4 address exhaustion and trading (oops, transfers), read the Addressing 2019 article by Geoff Huston.