Cloud giant AWS will start charging customers for public IPv4 addresses from next year, claiming it is forced to do this because of the increasing scarcity of these and to encourage the use of IPv6 instead.

The update will come into effect on February 1, 2024, when AWS customers will see a charge of $0.005 (half a cent) per IP address per hour for all public IPv4 addresses. … These charges will apply to all AWS services including EC2, Relational Database Service (RDS) database instances, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) nodes, and will apply across all AWS regions, the company said.