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IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

aws.amazon.com

51–60 of 114 posts

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#51

Honestly, can someone explain why it took so long? I mean, you can get IPv6 on a bunch of low-end budget VPSs. Why couldn't Amazon do it? And why cant GCE do it? Is it a lot of work?

A colleague of mine gave a talk at SRECon about the fun world of IPv6 provisioning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gjuVhph520

Granted, that isn't necessarily a pre-requisite for going dual stack (aka: just attaching a v6 address to a machine), but it shows the fun problems you run into.

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#52
post #36

I believe this doesn't mean there's IPv6 support for ELBs in a VPC yet. We unknowingly enabled dualstack configuration on Route 53 some time back and this led to users on devices which prioritised IPv6 over IPv4 to fail to connect.

There will be very soon. They announced it today during a session on ELB.

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#53
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This honestly doesn't surprise me. Adding an infinite number of IPs is one way bot writers get around rate limits. I've done it before when I worked for a company that made a facebook/myspace/etc crawler.

Out of curiosity, why does Amazon consider it their responsibility to prevent that? I'm personally glad that they do, but bots use resources, which is good for Amazon (money in their pocket), and as far as I know Amazon doesn't have anything it wants to protect from bots (at least, anything that would be heavily limited by IP).

In addition to the answers other people have given about not wanting AWS IP space blacklisted, people who are intending to do use services for nefarious purposes have a nasty habit of paying for them using stolen credit cards.

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#54
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know enough AWS to understand the announcement, but if your servers and your clients can speak IPv6 and you can skip al the NAT, you don't have to debug NAT problems.

We probably won't ever be rid of NAT. The likes of Cisco, who thrive on making things enterprisey and needlessly complicated will definitely be peddling IPv6 NAT soon, if they aren't already doing it.

You're probably right, but many telecoms have already deployed ipv6 without a bunch of layers of networking hell, and I'm hopeful that they'll just junk all the crazy ipv4 stuff without replicating it in ipv6. It'll be cheaper for them and nobody will notice the difference.

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#55
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious but why is IPv6 support such a priority for you that it would be the deciding factor in your choice of hosting provider?

In 2017, one should instead ask why it wouldn't be.

Because there are many other factors in choosing a hosting provider (price, performance, features, security, scalability, etc). It seems a bit weird that all of these would be less important to someone than IPv6. Though I guess I can imagine that for some businesses it could be hugely important. Was just wondering what OPs business was that it became an overriding priority.

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if that exists, why should I as someone running on EC2 care if I can use IPv6 natively or have to make use of such proxying/routing?

The reasons are many. I'll name just a few: * You cannot send UDP packets to your IPv4 customers. * You cannot initiate TCP connections to your IPv4 customers. * You cannot use any application-level protocol that carries information about source or destination IP address. * IPSec more or less goes out the window

But even if my desktop does IPV6.. I am still going to firewall it. Seems like not a "benefit" to throw up my device directly on the internet.

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#57

Pardon my ignorance, but why is this needed? I've seen dozens of "+1s" for ipv6 on both AWS and GCP, but no one says why really. Is there hardware out there on the public internet that cannot communicate over ipv4 already?

Yes, almost everything on my network because I only get a few IPv4 addresses to allocate between hundreds of devices.

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasons are many. I'll name just a few: * You cannot send UDP packets to your IPv4 customers. * You cannot initiate TCP connections to your IPv4 customers. * You cannot use any application-level protocol that carries information about source or destination IP address. * IPSec more or less goes out the window

But even if my desktop does IPV6.. I am still going to firewall it. Seems like not a "benefit" to throw up my device directly on the internet.

Of course you'll keep your firewall. NAT != Firewall

Your firewall may start with a simple "deny all incoming SYN packets" rule, but IPv6 gives you the option to open up holes in the firewall to any device or devices on your LAN (port forwarding only works once per port through a NAT).

The real benefits probably don't exist yet. There are entire categories of network software that have remained unknown and unexplored because it didn't work behind a NAT. There were several projects I wanted to write ~15 years ago that I never even started because it required a real internet connection, not a NAT "party line".

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#59

Pardon my ignorance, but why is this needed? I've seen dozens of "+1s" for ipv6 on both AWS and GCP, but no one says why really. Is there hardware out there on the public internet that cannot communicate over ipv4 already?

Along with the usual 'we are out of ipv4 space' - If you are in the IoT space you are dependent on IPv6. And if you are AWS you may be losing customers who are rolling out IoT infrastructure because of your lack of IPv6 support. http://www.computerworld.com/article/3071625/internet-of-thi...

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#60
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm kinda sick of all the AWS posts on here, but I'm trying to be fair since some of them are really interesting. This is one of those that's more of a "about damn time," features that'd I'd care about if I already didn't go with Digital Ocean/Linode instead just because of IPv6 support.

Just curious but why is IPv6 support such a priority for you that it would be the deciding factor in your choice of hosting provider?

We needed IPv6 support five years ago. IPv6 is so vital because without it, we'll see the cost of public IPs skyrocket. I'm surprised it hasn't considering two of the places I worked for in the past few years had trouble purchasing IPs for some of their larger data centre offerings.

It's sorta like the network neutrality argument, except you're talking about limits on who can offer services to everyone vs those with newer IPv6 devices and ISPs. You can end up with two different Internets.

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