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Ask HN: What will IPV6 migration actually look like?

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Ask HN: What will IPV6 migration actually look like?

#1

Post by GigabyteCoin »

And is this ever going to happen?

I have been hearing "IPV6 is just on the horizon", "IPV4 is completely exhausted, it's only a matter of months", etc... for years now.

IPV4 exhaustion scare-mongering has been so slow recently one might easily have assumed that it was forgotten about or that the problem has been solved.

I am sitting here writing some security checks into a new website I am working on that makes sure that IPV4 addresses aren't hammering certain important parts of the site too quickly... and I can't help but wonder when this code will become obsolete due to full IPV6 integration.

Does anyone have any insight into the current situation of IPV6?

Re: Ask HN: What will IPV6 migration actually look like?

#2

Post by sdrinf »

IPv6 usage is steadily increasing, currently hovering at 10% globally, and 23% in the US. [1]

This is driven partially by mobile deployments, partially by some ISPs rolling out support. Note, that the IPv4 address exhaustion referred to in the media is IANA-level; top-level exhaustion occurred on 31 January 2011 [2]. Also from there:

* Four of the five RIRs have exhausted allocation of all the blocks they have not reserved for IPv6 transition; this occurred on 15 April 2011 for the Asia-Pacific, on 14 September 2012 for Europe, on 10 June 2014 for Latin America and the Caribbean, and on 24 September 2015 for North America.

None of this impacts end-users, as ISPs have large reserves of non-used IPv4 addresses; and there are multiple mitigation strategies for post-exhaustion periods.

Also note, that even if all IPv4 address would be in public use currently, we still wouldn't "migrate" to IPV6 at-once: seeing how there are roughly ~25 billion Internet-connected devices (and 3.17 billion users) using it currently, migration can't take place overnight. Also note, that "pure ipv6" devices currently would be heavily disadvantaged: the majority of sites & services can't be accessed via ipv6 yet.

A probable migration pathway might be ramping up allocation of IPv6; as usage increases, servers will roll out support for it; which might hit a tipping point (similar to the current "HTTPS for everything") sometime around the 40-50% penetration rate. Once that occurs, ipv6-only users will no longer be disadvantaged; that, along with increasing price-points for dedicated ipv4 address might shift ISPs to start deploying ipv6-only, and use relays to access ipv4 services.

However, even under these conditions, servers will almost certainly will provide v4 access points, for reasons of maximum compatibility, and low cost (relative to all dev, deployment, domain, etc costs).

In conclusion, you can rest safely knowing that the code you wrote will be in use for a long time to come.

[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion

Re: Ask HN: What will IPV6 migration actually look like?

#3

Post by zurn »

For makers, it will hopefully look like the internet of the old days where you can just configure ACLs and/or crypto keys to allow traffic from one place to the other instead of using a towering stack of configuration tooling to manage address mappings, port forwardings and private DNS zones, and fighting rfc1918 addressing conflicts.

Security engineering is largely about managing complexity and having a firm grasp on the system you're securing, so it's definitely a win there too.

It's weird that we have IPv6 widely provided by consumer ISPs (wireless & wired) but AWS & GCE are the ones holding the whole thing back. A while ago it everyone assumed that servers are the easy part and getting consumer ISPs to play along was going to be hard...

About clients ceasing to have IPv4 connectivity, that's anybody's guess. It will definitely be a "happy problem" if/when that starts happening at some point in the distant future.

Re: Ask HN: What will IPV6 migration actually look like?

#4

Post by NetStrikeForce »

We are in the middle of such migration. More providers are supporting it, dual stack is on almost every major OS by default and they prefer IPv6 when possible.

Eventually all your traffic will be IPv6 and you wouldn't have noticed. Unless you have to migrate IPv4 only devices, in that case you'll be tired of hearing about it :)

Re: Ask HN: What will IPV6 migration actually look like?

#8

Post by epx »

IPv4 won't disappear or exhaust. It will fade out like a white dwarf, but it may well be still in use, 20 or 30 years from now. CGNAT at client side (already in widespread use) and server-side public IPs that cost money every month will keep usage of IPv4 addrs in check. Of course, richer protocols like P2P will have to go IPv6.

(Back in 1993, when a guy said that MS-DOS would be in use by 2000, I laughed at him. I made serious money on MS-DOS+xBase until 2005!)

Re: Ask HN: What will IPV6 migration actually look like?

#10

Post by justizin »

yeukhon wrote: post #6

Anyone know what's the biggest hold up of IPv6 on AWS side? They must be working on this for years, but never heard of any push or beta program at all.

.. or they haven't ..

VPC gives you your own entire rfc1918 space per region, which tho can be a pain to deal with overlap if you have site-to-site VPN, is enough for basically anyone.

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