Out of curiosity, why would you need to bind an arbitrary IP to a VM? What's wrong with the one it's presumably got? I know some places can move IPs around at

Out of curiosity, why would you need to bind an arbitrary IP to a VM? What's wrong with the one it's presumably got? I know some places can move IPs around at will, but it seems like the wrong layer in the stack to do it. Aren't IPs something you want to assign based on your network topology? If you need an arbitrary identifier that can move between machines, what's wrong with DNS? (And how are you not re-inventing DNS?) (and the names are more memorable) If you do have the capability to do this, does it not tie you to that provider? Presumably the IPs would be allocated to the provider, so switching to a new provider would necessitate a new IP, whereas DNS addresses can point anywhere. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding (I've never tried these shenanigans with IPs), so please correct me if I am.