[outworlder]

> AWS has probably millions of physical servers by now (they had ca. 1,4 million servers by December 2014 it seems) each with probably hundreds of services each needing an IP.

Why would any significant fraction of these servers require public IPs? And services for that matter.

I wouldn't be surprised if most of them are in private VPCs with only very few endpoints exposed.

If you are referring specifically to AWS, having servers in public subnets is actually an anti-pattern. You may want to do so with bastion hosts and a handful of more specialized services. For everything else, put them behind a load balancer. A single NLB will take one IP per availability zone and will be able to service hundreds of servers, if not more.

Then you have things like Cloudfront and the like.

Not many IPs are needed, overall, compared to the number of actual servers.