I've said this elsewhere in the thread, but Cloud NAT is kind of expensive. 4.5¢ per GB increases egress costs by 37.5% (normally 12¢ per GB) plus it applies to ingress as well, which is usually free.
Sure it doesn't apply to inbound traffic through load balancers, but if you transfer a lot of data to/from external APIs (i.e. connections by the instance) that could seriously add up.
Based on my company's usage, it will almost certainly be cheaper for us to just pay the $2.92/instance/month to keep using public V4 addresses on our GKE nodes.
This is false, no it will not. AWS charges for unassigned elastic IPs. Elastic IP can be assigned to a stopped EC2 instance and you will not incur any charges.
I thought Minecraft did support IPv6? Leastwise, I don't recall having any issues recently, although I'm still running v1.13 and atop Spigot.
I do recall some issues somewhere around 1.11-ish that required passing in the option -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=false. The server-ip property also needs to have any ":" escaped, e.g. "\:\:"
My question was directed to the OP's last statement of "Plus these games don't really support IPv6," because that doesn't match my experience.
My argument is that IF Google's cloud offerings supported IPv6, why would that not matter with a game like Minecraft? I'm pretty sure it supports IPv6.
EIPs are free and there is no plan to change that as far as we know today. You're thinking of the unused EIP penalty fee, which GCP and everyone else has long had an equivalent to.
