---
title: "Introducing Elastic IPs"
description: "Introducing elastic IPs to Exoscale."
date: 2017-02-07
author: "Philipp Strube"
tags: ["network"]
url: https://www.exoscale.com/blog/introducing-elastic-ips/
---
# Introducing Elastic IPs

Every virtual server instance on Exoscale gets one public IP. This IP will be linked to
your instance as long as it exists. Upon destruction,
IPs are returned to the global pool to be re-used by other instances.

One IP per instance combined with our security groups feature provides
both a simple and secure way to access your infrastructure.

While great for most scenarios, there are however use cases
where this approach did make things inconvenient and unnecessarily complex.

This is why today we're very excited to introduce the availability of
Elastic IP addresses at Exoscale. With Elastic IPs we now fully support use cases
that require IP portability without losing the simplicity of the default behavior.

![Introducing Elastic IPs](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/introducing-elastic-ips/introducing-elastic-ips.png)

Elastic IPs can be allocated within your organization and can then be associated to
any of your existing or future instances. Unlike our regular public IPs,
Elastic IPs are not returned to the global pool to be
re-used when instances are destroyed. Elastic IPs stay reserved to your organization
until explicitly de-allocated. You can associate or dissociate your Elastic IPs
to one of your instances in the same zone at any time. You can also associate
multiple Elastic IPs to a single instance.

Due to limited availability of IPv4 addresses, you will be charged per allocated
Elastic IP as long as it is registered to your organization. Fortunately, most
infrastructure scenarios can be implemented with a single Elastic IP allocation which
will run at CHF 10.- monthly. See our [pricing page](https://www.exoscale.com/pricing/) for details.

There are many use-cases that come to mind where Elastic IPs come in handy.

 * The ability to instantly re-assign an Elastic IP from one instance to
   another enables high availability load balancing of databases and services,
   and allows upgrading and scaling applications and services without downtime
   or having to rely on fast convergence of DNS caches.
 * When hosting multiple TLS-enabled websites, Elastic IPs allows setting up several
   IP-based certificates behind a single load balancer.

The launch of our Elastic IP feature does not change the default behaviour.
Each instance launched will still have one public IP assigned to it. If you associate one of
your registered Elastic IPs to an instance, the instance keeps the randomly
assigned public IP but will additionally receive traffic directed at the
Elastic IP. This is important for heartbeat and replication setups.

To get started with Elastic IPs, we provide a step-by-step
[Elastic IP guide](https://community.exoscale.com/documentation/compute/eip/)
that shows how to register and assign Elastic IPs through the web interface
and API as well as how to configure instances.

Elastic IPs are only available on our GV2 zone at the moment and will be available at DK2 shortly.

Elastic IPs are built on a substantial overhaul of our internal
routing infrastructure which will be used as the basis for several new
network-related features to come out in 2017, such as programmable
load balancers, private networks, and IPv6 support. Stay tuned!