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Ask HN: What will IPV6 migration actually look like?

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

#31

Post by janvdberg »

It will happen. I have both a DSL and a FTTH connection and both are dual stack already. When disabling IPv4 (on my CPE) most major sites are OK (Google, Facebook, Youtube). So from a consumer perspective the change will be less noticeable (DNS takes care of that). Security however is a different aspect: this could be a potential nightmare with lots of devices directly connected to the internet. Besides the security aspects, for ISPs (where I work) there are quite a lot of changes (main router vendors that are not ready yet, provisioning systems that are not ready, CPE's etc.) so the real work and part of the reason why adoption is slow, lies there.

All that being said: it's about time Hacker News itself becomes IPv6 ready!

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

#32

Post by jo909 »

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.

My guess is that their custom software defined networking infrastructure is the main holdup. There is little known about the SDN infrastructure behind AWS, but I would be surprised if large portions are not custom designed hardware and a homebrew control plane.

It is very slow to iterate on the hardware side at such a scale for cost reasons. The cost structure is very different from server hardware, where the increase in performance per watt and rack density of newer hardware essentially pays for itself at some point.

But a 10Gbps Port in your top of rack switch is good enough for many many years and multiple server generations, until you make the leap to a higher port speed.

If the chip inside your SDN switch has no understanding of IPv6, you could only tunnel such packets in software at substantial performance costs. So it takes ages until the whole physical network is using new enough gear.

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

#33

Post by regecks »

beachstartup wrote: post #30
zurn wrote: post #3

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 o…

> AWS & GCE that's because they have plenty of v4 space, which is now a competitive advantage. have you tried to get even a /24 lately? pay up, sucker. bitspace is now a market with exponential returns. it's the ultimate barrier to entry. the faster they move on it, the less of a barrier it will be to the competition. so why should they? welcome to the new microsoft. except this time, we're all eating it up and lovin…

> that's because they have plenty of v4 space, which is now a competitive advantage. have you tried to get even a /24 lately? pay up, sucker. bitspace is now a market with exponential returns.

Depends where you are. Maybe it's hard to get a range from ARIN, but we got a /23 from APNIC not one month ago for ~1k/yr. That is peanuts, and was not too difficult to quality for eligibility either.

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

#34

Post by mindcrime »

ra1n85 wrote: post #19
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.

What cloud provider currently supports IPv6?

Linode supports IPv6:

    [prhodes@doctorfeelgood ~]$ ping6 -n www.fogbeam.com    
    PING www.fogbeam.com(2600:3c02::f03c:91ff:fe84:7b1d) 56 data bytes
    64 bytes from 2600:3c02::f03c:91ff:fe84:7b1d: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=31.7 ms
    64 bytes from 2600:3c02::f03c:91ff:fe84:7b1d: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=39.8 ms 
    64 bytes from 2600:3c02::f03c:91ff:fe84:7b1d: icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=38.6 ms
    ^C

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

#35

Post by virtuallynathan »

beachstartup wrote: post #30
zurn wrote: post #3

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 o…

> AWS & GCE that's because they have plenty of v4 space, which is now a competitive advantage. have you tried to get even a /24 lately? pay up, sucker. bitspace is now a market with exponential returns. it's the ultimate barrier to entry. the faster they move on it, the less of a barrier it will be to the competition. so why should they? welcome to the new microsoft. except this time, we're all eating it up and lovin…

They don't really... I've heard the internal addressing at some cloud providers is a real mess. Multi-layer NAT, etc.

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

#36

Post by profmonocle »

> 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.

What you've actually been hearing about is various IPv4 exhaustion milestones. The world didn’t suddenly "run out" of IPv4 all at once.

The first big milestone was IANA running out in 2011. This meant that the regional registries (which actually hand out IP blocks to ISPs and large networks) could no longer get new space from the global pool. APNIC, the regional registry for Asia-Pacific, ran out a couple months later. (They didn’t "run out" as much as they went into a strict rationing mode.) The same thing happened to RIPE NCC (Europe) in 2012, LACNIC (Latin America) in 2014, and ARIN (North America) last September. (Interestingly, ARIN decided not to do any sort of rationing, North America is just completely out.) AFRINIC (Africa) is the only regional registry with enough space left that they're not rationing.

What does it actually mean that the regional registries are out of IPv4 space? It means you can't just go to a registry and say "hey I need more IP addresses" and pay your annual membership fees. You now have to purchase IPv4 space on a private market. Current prices actually aren't that bad - about $10/IP. So to be honest, it's not a huge crisis despite the regional registries having run out. The serious problem will be when it becomes impossible for companies to get the IP space they need at an affordable price. Ideally we should push for higher IPv6 adoption before it becomes a huge crisis.

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

#37

Post by snw »

In many companies the IPv6 migration has already happened. For those that have not started yet it will be more expensive if they wait even longer.

The hardest part seems to be training people. IPv6 is different - it is more than just "longer addresses". It is a newer protocol that fixes many more problems with IPv4 than just address exhaustion. So this "ipv6 migration" is actually an opportunity to leverage those new features.

Designing IT infrastructure IPv6 first and IPv4 second allows for so much simpler designs. You can have your complete network IPv6 only and do IPv4 on the edge for legacy clients. (Maybe doing outgoing NAT for v4 where required) The results are a much cleaner layout (because of the larger address space), simpler firewall rules, and so on.

It is not complicated or hard to do (in contrary I think that e.g. just setting up SLAAC is much simpler than managing DHCP) but the engineers need to know how it is different. They need training for that. People are often used to the old ways, once they have seen and worked with IPv6 it is no problem.

I've helped larger and smaller companies since ~2004 with those migrations. One observation I've made is that here in europe IPv6 is a basic fact of networking where as in the US it appears as if many companies are in denial. That cloud providers like AWS don't do native v6 is absolutely ridiculous.

When you write code or security rules today that is not designed with IPv6 in mind they are outdated today. Don't do it ;-)

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

#38

Post by ra1n85 »

mindcrime wrote: post #34
ra1n85 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What cloud provider currently supports IPv6?

Linode supports IPv6: [prhodes@doctorfeelgood ~]$ ping6 -n www.fogbeam.com PING www.fogbeam.com(2600:3c02::f03c:91ff:fe84:7b1d) 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 2600:3c02::f03c:91ff:fe84:7b1d: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=31.7 ms 64 bytes from 2600:3c02::f03c:91ff:fe84:7b1d: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=39.8 ms 64 bytes from 2600:3c02::f03c:91ff:fe84:7b1d: icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=38.6 ms ^C

Thanks!

Just looking at this makes me feel for network operators that have to troubleshoot layer 3 addresses directly and without DNS. There needs to be a better approach - like an intelligent clipboard.

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

#39

Post by bluedonuts »

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.

AWS does support ipv6 in ELBs in a fashion. ELBs will have both an ipv6 and a dual stack DNS entry created for them, in addition to the ipv4.

example.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com (A Record)

ipv6.example.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com (AAAA Record)

dualstack.example.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com (A or AAAA Record)

These records will only be displayed for ELBs in classic despite existing and being resolvable for VPC ELBs. The twist is that there is no way to add security groups with ipv6 addresses in VPC so its not possible to receive requests.

Amusingly this means ELBs in classic have an advantage on VPC when it comes to ipv6.

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

#40

Post by icebraining »

ra1n85 wrote: post #19
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.

What cloud provider currently supports IPv6?

Both VPS providers I use - DigitalOcean and TransIP - support IPv6, though only the latter does so by default.
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