Comment by crawshaw
4 days ago
(exe.dev co-founder here)
We are not running out of IPv4 space because NAT works. The price of IPv4 addresses has been dropping for the last year.
I know this because I just bought another /22 for exe.dev for the exact thing described in this blog post: to get our business customers another 1012 VMs.
Yep. As sad as it is for p2p, NAT handles most uses cases for users, and SNI routing (or creative hacks like OP) handles most use cases for providers.
I was surprised how low IPv4 prices have gotten. Lowest since at least 2019.
Amazingly even most p2p works with NAT, see (and I am biased here) Tailscale.
I certainly wish we simply had more addresses. But v4 works.
Your NAT traversal article is amazing, but sadly the long tail (ha) means any production quality solution has to have relays, which is a huge complexity jump for people who just want to run some p2p app on their laptop.
And it's not clear it will ever be better than it is now with CGNAT on the rise.
Would love to hear I'm wrong about this.