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IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

aws.amazon.com

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Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#71

Post by manigandham »

sigjuice wrote: post #49
toast0 wrote: 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.

NAT was created to solve the ip space shortage, which ipv6 doesnt have. There's no point in ipv6 NAT.

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#72

Post by fulafel »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #65
wmf wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite pattern is much more convenient: IPv4 on the public endpoint and IPv6-only internally. AWS is now close to supporting this. http://blog.ipspace.net/2014/03/facebook-is-close-to-having-...

Could you explain? How does it help to use IPv6 internally if you're using IPv4 publicly? One of the original motivations for IPv6 was that it would provide enough address space for every device in the world to have its own unique IP address. Then devices could communicate with each other directly, without worrying about intervening NATs. If you're using IPv4 publicly, then you've already lost that advantage. Concern…

It frees you from expensive complexities arising from tunneling and private address space. You don't need the network engineering and service costs to bring your private 10.x overlay network to your various datacenters[1] behind different ISPs, you don't have to fight with addressing conflicts when talking to other people using rfc1918 space or debug situations where 1918 addresses are ambiguous, etc. It's cheaper, safer and simpler to integrate with other organizations because you only have to configure your firewall rule instead of trying to mash together incompatible rfc1918 internal networks and overlay technologies in addition to the fw. Your security posture is better and cheaper to maintain because your simpler network is easier to reason about.

[1] meaning your network locations, not your private datacenter (necessarily)

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#73

Post by ghshephard »

djsumdog wrote: post #33
axyjo wrote: post #2

Finally! It's been a major deficiency in AWS. Can't wait to see this roll out to us-west-2.

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.

This is the post I've been waiting for 2+ years - we have a ton of projects that we would like to deploy on AWS, but EC2 and friends have never supported IPv6, which has blocked us from moving forward, and our customers are reluctant to deploy on anything other than the big 4 (IBM/Google/Azure/AWS).

Looking very forward to trying this out.

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#74

Post by sigjuice »

manigandham wrote: post #71
sigjuice wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NAT was created to solve the ip space shortage, which ipv6 doesnt have. There's no point in ipv6 NAT.

Tell that to the people who want NAT for "security".

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#75

Post by ivix »

zbjornson wrote: post #34

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?

For those working with the IoT, this is VERY much of interest.

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#76

Post by ghshephard »

harryh wrote: post #35
djsumdog wrote: post #33

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?

Our entire application back end is written in IPv6 only. We don't have an IPv4 version of our product. Until IPv6 was offered, no way for us to host our application on AWS.

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#77

Post by electrum »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #65
wmf wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite pattern is much more convenient: IPv4 on the public endpoint and IPv6-only internally. AWS is now close to supporting this. http://blog.ipspace.net/2014/03/facebook-is-close-to-having-...

Could you explain? How does it help to use IPv6 internally if you're using IPv4 publicly? One of the original motivations for IPv6 was that it would provide enough address space for every device in the world to have its own unique IP address. Then devices could communicate with each other directly, without worrying about intervening NATs. If you're using IPv4 publicly, then you've already lost that advantage. Concern…

> Could you explain? How does it help to use IPv6 internally if you're using IPv4 publicly?

See this presentation about IPv6 at Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2234775539/10152303014725540...

> IPv4 offers more than enough address space within its private ranges for your private network

While theoretically true from a raw numbers standpoint, it breaks down at Facebook's scale when you have many gigantic data centers all over the world and start thinking about how you assign the addresses and manage the network that uses them.

As the presentation says, there was lots of wastage due to racks being /24 and clusters being /n (where n < 24).

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#78

Post by vbernat »

zbjornson wrote: post #34

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?

More and more people are now getting IPv6-only connections (notably on mobile). To access IPv4-only websites, the ISP is using "carrier-grade NAT". Therefore, if your website is IPv4-only, users will go through a big translation cluster. The incentive for an ISP to keep it running well will become lower with time: the most "important" websites are accessible through IPv6. If you are IPv4-only, you will provide some of your users suboptimal service because the CGNAT box may slow down connections, drop connections or loose packets.

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#79

Post by vbernat »

dispose13432 wrote: post #48

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?

The more layers you have, the more time you need to convert all of them to IPv6 (from network to all the applications). IPv6 implementations of various things is always less complete than their IPv4 counterpart.

Notably, even low-level stuff may still be difficult to make with IPv6. For example, Linux supports IP equal-cost multipath routing for IPv6 since 2012. Quagga, a popular routing daemon, still doesn't support that. BIRD, another open-source routing daemon, just got partial support for it this year. If your network is relying on this, it's an additional burden to deploy IPv6.

Re: IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds

#80

Post by baq »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #63
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A funny quip, but since it seems like you're missing the point: what's the business impact of the choice, or the existence/absence of IPv6 support in a hosting provider? If I'm running a small startup that's available as a website, how does IPv6 support matter to me? (Assuming that I can otherwise get IPv4 addresses for hosting my site, which I can.)

you'll always be able to get an ipv4 address, how much will it cost you in 5 or 15 years though...
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