Azure Out of US IPv4 Addresses… Or is it?
If you currently login to Azure, spin up a virtual machine and open an internet browser, you might be surprised to see that your US based virtual machine shows an international styled flavor of your favorite website. You might be confused as to whether or not your virtual machine is even located in the US or if the Azure portal is malfunctioning and placing your data on the incorrect continent.
Rest assured that Azure is not malfunctioning. It has been noted on a Microsoft blog that Azure is quickly running out of US based IPv4 addresses which means that the public cloud provider has been borrowing IP addresses from its South American and Asian pools in order to satisfy user demands.
It has been incorrectly reported by other cloud news websites that Microsoft is completely out of IPv4 space in the US. A blog post on azure.com mentions that this is not the case. In fact, the post written by Ganesh Srinivasan says, “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.”
On a larger scale, Microsoft will eventually migrate into the emerging IPv6 convention which will open up more American IP addresses for those who require them on their virtual machines. One of the more popular questions being asked is if these addresses can be transferred into the American namespace. Ganesh Srinivasan answers this question by saying, “It is not possible to transfer registration because the IP space is allocated to the registration authorities by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.”
In efforts to reassure Azure customers, the post continued by pointing out Microsoft’s Trust Center, “It is important to note that the IP address registration authority does not equate to IP address physical location (i.e., you can have an IP address registered in Brazil but allocated to a device or service physically located in Virginia). Thus when you deploy to a U.S. region, your service is still hosted in U.S. and your customer data will remain in the U.S. as detailed in our Trust Center.”
