Re:How bad is IPv4 address exhaustion?
by notyourday on Thursday February 15, 2018 @09:33AM
(#16384241)
> I actually disagree on this point. The rapid deployment and horizontal scaling that cloud recommends implicitly (failure domains, microservices as small isolated single purpose units et al.) also promote the consumption of IPv4 address space.
Nothing but the external entry points in a cloud need to be publicly accessible IPv4.
You just get given some 10.x space anyway. It only really bites you on the ass when you need to exchange traffic between hosting providers and that can generally be done although you may have to find a middle man in some cases.
The other thing is Docker and Kubernetes are not supporting IPv6 today so that definitely locks a lot of the more modern cloud deployments to IPv4, even if it's S2S communication which could have been IPv6 only (since you would control both ends) otherwise... so that's another thing.
However, new network layer technologies like "Layer-3 all the way to the server" are allowing providers to use their entire IPv4 allocation by having BGP pushing /32 routes internally and this has been the biggest helper in my opinion, no longer do you have a static /24 allocation and a bunch of dead space that can't be freed easily.
Of course people who are new to OPs/Dev haven't really seen this much- but I would probably venture more than 50% of ipv4 space is locked into allocations that are mostly empty.
-- I also think there is still an increasing population of internet users and VPS/Cloud providers give a cheap and easy way to be online too.. $5 for a VPS in most cases.