In July 2023, AWS announced that they would begin charging an additional fixed fee of $0.005 per IP per hour for all Public IP v4 addresses beginning February 1, 2024. This is equivalent to approximately $3.65 per IP per month. This charge already applies to allocated but unused IPs and instances with more than one allocated IP, but will now apply across all Public IPs.  

It’s worth noting for context that using Elastic IPs also attracts a traffic charge: data transferred “in” and “out” from public or Elastic IPv4 addresses is charged at $0.01/GB in each direction. However, this charge has always existed and remains unchanged. 

While these new charges are very small on a per-node basis, they can add up across a large estate. We have estimated that that even in the worst-case scenario, these new charges are very unlikely to represent more than 1% of overall AWS costs for a production cluster, and most likely less than 0.5%. 

For customers wanting to minimize this expense, Instaclustr has an existing option of Private Network Clusters that do not allocate Public IPs to individual nodes; instead, they provision a small, dedicated bastion host in each cluster to provide Instaclustr administrative access.

However, customers not currently using Private Network Clusters should note the following before making a decision to move: 

1. Private Network Clusters are considered an Enterprise tier feature, so if your cluster is not already using features from this tier (e.g. PCI and most add-ons) then you will incur a 20% increase in Instaclustr charges. 
2. Private Network Clusters require provisioning a small bastion host and a NAT gateway in the cluster. We estimate the hourly costs of these components to be equivalent to around 20 IPs’ worth on the new charges (there may also be data transfer cost savings from removing public IPs, but these are harder to estimate). 
3. A cluster cannot be changed from Public IP to Private Network Clusters in place; a complete data migration is required. 
4. Many customers not currently using Private Network Clusters are doing so for network management reasons which would need to be considered before moving. 

Should Private Network Clusters not be a suitable solution, the other approach to reduce this charge is to consolidate on larger instances to reduce the number of nodes in the clusters. 

Instaclustr now offers node sizes up to 4xl across most offerings. This consolidation will typically be cost neutral across AWS and Instaclustr charges other than the new per-IP charge. This consolidation can be carried out in place but will require replacing each node in the cluster and then removing nodes, which may result in temporarily higher charges as the transition occurs. Contact Instaclustr Support if you would like to review if this option is suitable for your cluster. 

Finally, moving from IP v4 to IP v6 is a way to entirely avoid this charge. However, Instaclustr does not currently support IP v6 based clusters as we have seen no real customer demand for this option. If you are planning an IP v6 transition, then please let us know so we can consider adding this support to our roadmap.