Microsoft Azure’s use of non-US IPv4 address space in US regions

[wlanboy]

http://blog.azure.com/2014/06/11/windows-azures-use-of-non-us-ipv4-address-space-in-us-regions/

IPv4 address space has been fully assigned in the United States, meaning there is no additional IPv4 address space available. This requires Microsoft to use the IPv4 address space available to us globally for the addressing of new services. The result is that we will have to use IPv4 address space assigned to a non-US region to address services which may be in a US region.  It is not possible to transfer registration because the IP space is allocated to the registration authorities by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

At times your service may appear to be hosted in a non-US location.

Service and Data are located where deployed

Funny thing that even Microsoft has to move IP addresses around to meet the demand.

Just read their statement about IPv6:

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/faq/?rnd=1#

Microsoft has played a leading role in helping customers to smoothly transition from IPv4 to IPv6 for the past several years. To date, Microsoft has built IPv6 support into many of its products and solutions like Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 R2. Microsoft is committed to expanding the worldwide capabilities of the Internet through IPv6 and enabling a variety of valuable and exciting scenarios, including peer-to-peer and mobile applications. The foundational work to enable IPv6 in the Azure environment is well underway. However, we are unable to share a date when IPv6 support will be generally available at this time.

 

[rds100]

Well, ARIN has whole 2 /10s and 2 /11s left in stock. It's time for Microsoft to throw some bribes around.

 

[SkylarM]

Well, ARIN has whole 2 /10s and 2 /11s left in stock. It's time for Microsoft to throw some bribes around.

Pretty sure if they dropped a request in for it, they'd get it.

 

[sundaymouse]

AWS EC2 also does not have ipv6.

 

[drmike]

I find it hard to believe Microsoft is having an IP shortage and that Azure is that popular and needing IPs....

Quite the collection of ASNs for them.. unsure how many total IPs under their control:

http://bgp.he.net/search?search[search]=microsoft&commit=Search

Then again, wasn't MS years back the boneheaded company that bought a large group of IPs from a private buyer at like $10 per IP?

 

[Amfy]

Exactly. Also, they just got 104.40.0.0/13 in early May this year. Kinda doubt they need 500k+ addresses in just one month.

 

[Dylan]

UPDATE (June 13, 2014)

The below blog misstated the situation around Microsoft Azure’s IPv4 address space in US regions. Currently, Microsoft has IPv4 space in US regions. That said, inventory space is a dynamic situation. In the past some customers were assigned non-US IPv4 addresses as a result of limited inventory.

We have already updated many major geo-location databases to ensure customers do not experience any confusion in the future. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

http://blog.azure.com/2014/06/11/windows-azures-use-of-non-us-ipv4-address-space-in-us-regions/

 

[drmike]

^--- what a fake scarcity stunt   Suddenly it is in vogue to act IP depleted.

 

[raindog308]

I find it hard to believe Microsoft is having an IP shortage and that Azure is that popular and needing IPs....

Someone did some detective work and came up with a number of 500,000ish for Amazon EC2 in 2012:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/amazon-ec2-cloud-is-made-up-of-almost-half-a-million-linux-servers/10620

It may have doubled since then.

Microsoft could be half that. Any small business (with virtually zero verification) can get $150/month credit on Azure which is enough for a beefy 4GB VM. Same for any student, many IT workers, etc. And of course there are some genuine paying customers

 

[dano]

I also find it's hard to think that Azure has had enough "growth" to run out of IPv4 addresses - for the record, I don't know many people(1 or 2, compared to 10-15 in the early 2000's) who still use m$ servers, and over the last 10 years or so, much less than 5% of the servers of any company I have worked for, have been m$ servers(couple of exchange machines, a domain controller/AD).

In fact, most of the folks that I knew who were "m$ admins" back in the day, are now in another career, like real estate, construction, insurance sales, etc.

 

[PwnyExpress]

There is a lot of demand for Microsoft Azure because of the way how they're releasing certain features that's ONLY available on Microsoft's Azure. Not to mention that Microsoft Azure doesn't only do VPSes. They do Shared Hosting with optional Dedicated Web Workers on a dedicated VPS that only runs your code, CDN, Storage, Shared MS-SQL instances and a whole lot of services I can't name off the top of my head.

Then again, anybody who has a MSDN subscription is entitled to $150USD of credits per month for free.