Remember that looming IPv4 address exhaustion issue? Well, Microsoft Azure has already hit its limit in the U.S. and is deploying some user-requested VMs using IPv4 addresses from far, far away.
That is not to say the VMs are actually running in, say, Brazil rather than the U.S., according to a blog post by Ganesh Srinivasan, Microsoft senior program manager. The problem is that IPv4 addresses -- scarce everywhere -- are running out in some regions faster than others but you cannot transfer the addresses themselves from one regional authority to another.
But, as Srinivasan said, the IP address registration authority does not equal the physical location of that IP address -- so an IP address registered in Brazil can be "allocated to a device or service physically located in Virginia," he wrote.
That may be, but this address shortage is no small issue and those Brazilian addresses aren't going to last long as billions more devices come online. In this day and age, many businesses and government agencies must be assured that their data or their customer data remains in a given geography.
This question of IP address shortage will be addressed in one of the infrastructure-of-the-future panels at Structure next week.
As Gigaom reported yesterday Thursday, adoption of IPv6, which allows longer address names will accommodate billions more mobile devices, sensors and other Internet of Things stuff coming online. Each of those things needs a unique IP address, and as we're seeing, the IPv4 tank is almost on empty.
So time's a wasting.