OVHcloud Opens Up Bring Your Own IP Service For IPv4 Failover

French cloud provider OVHcloud has opened up a Bring Your Own IP service, which it said allows customers to reuse existing public IPv4 blocks as failover addresses in the event of an outage.

The Bring Your Own IP import service, dubbed BYOIP, allows customers to import, via their OVHcloud Control Panel, any existing ranges of public IPv4 addresses they may have to use as blocks of IP failover addresses in the cloud. The service was previously available to some customers as part of an early access period.

BYOIP will make network planning easier when migrating to the cloud, the company maintains. Customers still own any IP addresses they bring in, and OVHcloud said it offers full reversibility so that when the time comes, customers' IPv4 addresses will be free of lock-in.

According to the company, each OVHcloud service includes a pre-configured IPv4 (/32) and IPv6 block (/64), but users can attach up to 256 additional IP addresses for extra flexibility. It supports floating IPs that can be switched from one service to another in the same datacenter, and customers can also switch IPs between different datacenters, if the datacenters are both located in the same country.

This ability means that customers can operate high availability services, and handle infrastructure-related issues such as hardware failures and system overloads, the company said.

The BYOIP service is available with OVHcloud's Bare Metal Cloud, Hosted Private Cloud, Public Cloud products, as well as vRack and IP Load Balancer.

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OVHcloud said it was offering the new service "within the context of increasing scarcity for IPv4 addresses." The last available blocks of IPv4 addresses were supposedly allocated back in 2019, although IPv4 continues to be widely used and many see little reason to migrate to IPv6, especially as entire organizations can hide behind network address translation schemes, while blocks of addresses can be recovered from networks that no longer need them, or freed up using various tricks.

The BYOIP service offers monthly billing, according to OVHcloud, which also said there were no setup fees or commitments. The service will roll out in the coming weeks across all its cloud datacenters.

OVHcloud gained some notoriety last year when a network reconfiguration in one of its datacenters resulted in a worldwide outage that lasted for around an hour, while earlier in the year a fire destroyed two of its European datacenters. ®