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What is the AWS Elastic IP address?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) should be a common word for you if you are working in the IT sector. It is the world’s largest cloud service provider. Top brands, such as Netflix, Twitch, and LinkedIn, use AWS but the most beautiful thing about AWS is that it is cheap; you pay for what you need, so everyone can use it. AWS provides a wide range of services. In this blog, we will learn about the following:

What is AWS Elastic IP?
AWS Elastic IP Pricing
Characteristics of AWS Elastic IP
Difference between Elastic IP, Public IP, and Static IP
Working of AWS Elastic IP
Limitation of Elastic IP
Conclusion

What is AWS Elastic IP?

An Elastic IP (EIP) address is more of a static IPv4 address that is designed for dynamic cloud computing. The main purpose of these IPs is to mask the failure of software or instance from your AWS account.

This is achieved by remapping the address to another instance, which is available in your account as quickly as possible. An IP address is automatically allocated to your AWS account and it will be yours unless you decide to release it. On the other hand, you have the chance to specify the IP in a DNS record to your domain. This will make sure that the specified domain points to your instance.

This address is reachable from the internet like any other public IPv4 address. You can associate this IP address with your instance if your instance does not have any public IPv4 address to enable communication from the internet to the instance. At present, the AWS EIP does not support addresses for IPv6.

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AWS Elastic IP Pricing

AWS imposes a small, hourly charge to make sure that the provided IP addresses are used efficiently. There are a few conditions that are applied to a business to acquire the pricing charges. They are as follows:

If you need to assign multiple IPs to the same instance
If the instances with IPs are stopped or may be terminated
If the IP address is unattached from the network interface
If the IPs were remapped more than a hundred times over a period of one month

So, the pricing for these AWS EIPs is US$0.005 per hour for IPs that are not assigned to any running instances. For IPs that are remapped more than the limit, the cost is around US$0.10 for every remapping that occurs.

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Characteristics of AWS Elastic IP

Now, let us see some basic characteristics of Elastic IPs:

As mentioned earlier, these IP addresses are static; so, they cannot be changed over time.
In order to use these IPs, the first step is to allocate an address to your AWS account. The next step is to associate with the network interface or your instances.
These IPs are also associated with the primary network interface of the instance for which the IP address is associated. This goes both ways; so, when you associate the instance with the network interface of an instance, it is also associated with the instance.
The public IPv4 address of an instance will be released if you associate the Elastic IP with the instance; that particular IPv4 address will be released to Amazon’s pool of public IPv4 addresses.
The thing with public IPv4 addresses is that you cannot reuse them and you will not be able to convert them to the Elastic IP address.
Here, you will be able to disassociate them from an instance and you can reassociate them to another instance. You will be able to resume your connections to the newly associated resource. The disassociated IP address will still be allocated to your account unless you deliberately decide to release it.
If an instance has a public Ipv4 address but you associate it with an Elastic IP, the public DNS hostname of the instance will be changed to match with the newly associated IP address.
The Elastic IP address will either be from the custom IP pool that you brought to your AWS account or from AWS’s own pool of IPv4 addresses. If the used IP address is from your custom IP pool, then it will not be considered for Elastic IP address limits.
When the IP address is allocated, it can be associated with the network border group. If the network border group is specified, then AWS will set it automatically to one of the available zones in the region.
An Elastic IP is for use in a definite network border group and region, so it cannot be moved to different regions.

Difference between Elastic IP, Public IP, and Static IP

The internet recognizes you by your public IP address. A public IP address is an address that your internet-connected device uses to communicate with the rest of the internet.

IP addresses that do not change are known as static IP addresses. They’re widespread in business and cloud computing, which is why Amazon’s Elastic IP framework contains them.
A static IP address is beneficial for a variety of reasons. For DNS searches in cloud computing, a static IP address is advantageous. The process of loading content can be hampered if IP addresses change.

Elastic IP is utilized for dynamic cloud computing in the AWS cloud environment, according to AWS. It’s crucial to make this distinction – If your AWS instance goes down, you’ll want to keep your IP address and preserve contact with your account.

Therefore, an Elastic IP is a hybrid of a public and a static IP address. It enables you to keep advertising AWS instances within your AWS network infrastructure.

Working of AWS Elastic IP

Now that you have a basic idea of what AWS EIP is, let us see some tasks that you will do in the cloud.

Allocate an Elastic IP Address
Describe your Elastic IP Address
Tag an Elastic IP Address
Associate or Disassociate an Elastic IP Address with an Instance or Network Interface
Release an Elastic IP Address

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Allocate an Elastic IP Address

Allocating an IP address to your account is simple. You can allocate your IP address either from Amazon’s pool of IP addresses or your custom IP address pool that you have brought into your account.

Open the Amazon EC2 console
Choose Network & Security, Elastic IPs in the navigation panel
Select Allocate Elastic IP address
For the Public IPv4 address pool, choose one of the following:
- Amazon’s pool of IPv4 addresses: If you want an IPv4 address to be allocated from Amazon’s pool of IPv4 addresses
- My pool of public IPv4 addresses: If you want to allocate an IPv4 address from an IP address pool that you have brought to your AWS account. This option is disabled if you do not have any IP address pools.
- The customer-owned pool of IPv4 addresses: If you want to allocate an IPv4 address from a pool created from your on-premises network for use with AWS Outposts. This option is disabled if you do not have AWS Outposts.
Add or remove a tag
Choose Allocate

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Describe your Elastic IP Address

To describe your IP address, follow these steps:

Open Amazon EC2 console
In the navigation panel, choose Elastic IPs
Select the Elastic IP address to view and choose Actions. View details

Tag an Elastic IP Address

You can use tags to differentiate among your IP addresses by following the given steps:

Open Amazon EC2 console
Choose Elastic IP in the navigation panel
Select the Elastic IP address to tag and choose Actions. View details
In the Tags section, choose Manage tags
Specify a tag key and value pair
Choose Save

Associate or Disassociate an Elastic IP Address with an Instance or Network Interface

Open Amazon EC2 console
Choose Elastic IPs in the navigation panel

For associating the IP address with an instance or network interface:

Select the Elastic IP address to associate. Choose Actions. Associate Elastic IP address
For Resource type, choose instance or network interface
Choose the instance or network interface with which to associate the Elastic IP address. You can also enter text to search for a specific instance or network interface
Choose Associate

For disassociating the IP address with an instance or network interface:

Select the Elastic IP address to disassociate. Choose Actions. Disassociate Elastic IP address
Choose Disassociate

Releasing an Elastic IP Address

You can release your unwanted elastic IP addresses to avoid the charges for them. To do that, follow the below-mentioned steps:

Open Amazon EC2 console
Choose Elastic IPs in the navigation panel
Select the Elastic IP address(es) to release. Choose Actions. Release Elastic IP address(es)
Choose Release

Limitation of Elastic IP

Even though Elastic IP is simple to use, it has some limitations. We all know that public IPv4 addresses are scarce internet resources. So, by default, AWS limits the maximum number of Elastic IP addresses per region to five. The main purpose of these IP addresses is to mask the failure instances by remapping the addresses to other instances so that AWS recommends using IPs for that and for other internode communication.

Conclusion

I hope this blog gives you insight into what AWS Elastic IPs is all about. Cloud computing is the field that has and will have a lot of job openings all around the world in the near future. So, it is up to you to grab the opportunity and become a cloud expert and earn more than other IT jobs.

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