Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) customers can now assign IP prefixes to their EC2 instances

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now allows you to assign IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes to your EC2 instances, enabling you to scale and simplify the management of your container and networking applications that require multiple IP addresses on an instance.

Many container orchestrators require each container workload to have a unique IP address. This feature allows you to assign hundreds or even thousands of IP addresses to an instance, thereby increasing the number of containers you can host in an instance. Assigning prefixes to your instance also simplifies the management of your VPCs, as you can launch and terminate containers without having to orchestrate individual IP assignments.

Assigning IP prefixes to EC2 instances can also help you optimize the cost of running networking applications, such as virtual firewalls. Prior to this feature, to run these applications, you needed to use larger instances just to get support for a higher number of IP addresses. Now you can run the same application on a smaller instances as you can assign the same or more IP addresses by using prefixes, thereby optimizing cost.

This feature is available in all public regions and AWS GovCloud (US), with support in China (Beijing), and China (Ningxia) coming soon.

To get started, use the AWS CLI, SDK or Console to assign prefixes to EC2 instance. There is no additional charge to use this feature. For more information about this feature, visit the VPC documentation.