Plan and allocate public IP address requirements across cloud resources.
Public IP planning sums every service that requires direct internet-routable addressing — load balancers, bastion hosts, VPN endpoints — plus the IPs consumed by NAT gateways (which need at least one public IP each, more if scaling for port capacity), then applies a redundancy multiplier to account for standby capacity, multi-AZ duplication, or failover requirements. Cloud providers often charge per allocated public IP and increasingly charge for idle ones too, so right-sizing this number avoids both under-provisioning (risking port exhaustion or availability gaps) and unnecessary ongoing cost.
Total public IPs needed
total_ips = (direct_services + nat_gateways × ips_per_gateway) × redundancy_factor
Redundancy needs typically scale with the size of the base deployment — doubling capacity for active/standby or multi-AZ resilience means doubling every category of public-facing resource, not just adding a flat buffer, which is why a multiplier models it more accurately than a fixed addend.
Additional IPs on a NAT gateway multiply its available port pool for connections to any single destination (see the NAT Gateway Capacity calculator) — high-connection-volume workloads to a small number of destinations sometimes need multiple IPs per gateway to avoid port exhaustion.
No — pricing models vary and change over time; some providers now charge hourly for any allocated public IPv4 address regardless of use, including idle ones. Check your specific provider's current pricing tools for exact costs rather than assuming a flat rate.
No — this planner is specifically for internet-routable public IPs. Services accessible only within your VPC/VNet or over private connectivity (VPN, Direct Connect, ExpressRoute) don't need public IPs and should be planned using the Private IP Planner calculator instead.