On Sept. 1, 2022 at 2:43:08 (UTC) AWS announced/published IPv4 addresses hit 74,338,005, which is 2.0079% of all usable public IPv4 addresses. That’s a rather significant milestone if you ask me!
Naturally the first question is likely, how does one know how many IP addresses does AWS announce/publish? The simple answer is that AWS regularly publishes this information in a json file named ip-ranges.json. (For more info from AWS see the AWS blog post from 11/2014 announcing the publishing of this file, along with AWS IP address ranges from AWS documentation which details how to access the file and parse it with the AWS CLI using jq, and directly with the AWS Tools for PowerShell.)
One “problem” with this file is that once updated (which often occurs several times per day) previous versions of the file are not available from AWS. However, thanks to “joetek” about five years of history of this file (along with variations, like IPs per service) is available on github. And user “seligman” has published tools which make parsing this file quick and easy.
The next question may be how many IPv4 addresses are “publicly usable?” First, IPv4 has a total address space of 4,294,967,296 (2^32). However, many ranges of these addresses are not available for public usage, for instance RFC1918 defines the common ranges for “private usage,” 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16, along with a whole slew of other addresses. In fact, one of the best lists is in the aws_ipv4_size.py python app by seligman on github where known ranges are defined and excluded from the overall range of addresses leaving us with a net of 3,702,258,432 addresses which are publicly usable. So, I am using that number to base the calculations in the graph above which tracks AWS’s usage/publishing of IPv4 addresses over the past five years where they went from 0.7443% (in July 2017) to the current 2.0081% (from the latest file published at 2022-09-02-17-13-08 UTC today).
It’s also worth noting that of the roughly 9 million addresses added to this aws-ranges over the past three days (which pushed them over the 2% mark discussed here) none appear yet to have been associated with specific services, as they are listed as service, AMAZON (rather than S3, EC2, ROUTE53, etc.). These addresses have been added to various regions around the world, including the announced, but not-yet-online Isreal region, il-central-1. So it appears they are ramping up address space in these regions for various services, and likely newly announced local zones around the world.
Despite the fact that IPv4 addresses are tight to say the least, AWS appears to have somewhere north of 100 million IPv4 addresses and are likely in the process of acquiring more. So with that assumption they are currently advertising around 75% (or less) of their total “owned” IPv4 addresses. And despite the fact that IPv6 has an unbelievably huge number of addresses we’ll be using IPv4 addresses well into the future, so to fuel AWS’s growth they will have to acquire more addresses and will certainly continue to publish more addresses, driving these numbers (total advertised, and percentage of all available) higher. I will continue to monitor these and publish posts when warranted.