I use EC2, and I'm 'renting' an elastic IP (v4) address from them for 1 cent an hour while it's not in use. I'm using the EC2 instance as a modified proxy server for a startup I'm working on, and obviously, I have to secure it. To do so, in Apache, I set my Allow rule to allow my home IP address for testing, which I can pay Comcast to keep static for me, and the IP address of the server I host the rest of my site on, which grabs content off of the EC2 server to display.
This is easy today, but I worry it will be more difficult if IPv6 migration doesn't happen and there is a shortage of cheap IPv4 addresses. End-user addressing provides immense value to web developers, because it makes it easy to connect computers with global addresses. I understand that NAT can take care of many of the architecture problems, but its still useful, as a developer, to avoid the headache of worrying about the way packets are being routed and just use a single number to represent a single computer/iphone/laser-nose-hair-trimmer connected to the Internet. It's a layer of abstraction that, unless I'm understanding incorrectly, NAT makes more difficult. Am I wrong?
This is easy today, but I worry it will be more difficult if IPv6 migration doesn't happen and there is a shortage of cheap IPv4 addresses. End-user addressing provides immense value to web developers, because it makes it easy to connect computers with global addresses. I understand that NAT can take care of many of the architecture problems, but its still useful, as a developer, to avoid the headache of worrying about the way packets are being routed and just use a single number to represent a single computer/iphone/laser-nose-hair-trimmer connected to the Internet. It's a layer of abstraction that, unless I'm understanding incorrectly, NAT makes more difficult. Am I wrong?