The IPv6 Transition

The IPv6 Transition
potaroo.net

…but the graph below that text shows 40% of traffic is IPv6, so the v4 space is only shared across 12e9 devices?

In my experience the big holdouts these days are corporate networks. All my domestic ISPs (cell, home, data centre) provide IPv6 and most devices use it by default. Meanwhile at the office we’re struggling to bring up a new internal service because our v4 IPAM is a legacy mess where the most you can calve off is a “class A” /27.

> This exercise predicts that we’ll see completion of this transition in late 2045, or some 20 years into the future.

Anyone willing to place a bet on this?

> While the design of IPv6 consumed a lot of attention at the time, the concept of transition of the network from IPv4 to IPv6 did not.

> Given the runaway adoption of IPv4, there was a naive expectation that IPv6 would similarly just take off, and there was no need to give the transition much thought. In the first phase, we would expect to see applications, hosts and networks adding support for IPv6 in addition to IPv4, transforming the internet into a dual stack environment. In the second phase we could then phase out support for IPv4.

I really don't understand this, how do you not make a transition plan the #1 requirement for selecting the next IP. (But the article goes on to say...)

The urgency of IPv6 adoption was predicated on the assumption that every connected device, both server and client, needs a unique and stable IP address. Back when IPv6 was first discussed, you couldn't even host two HTTPS sites on the same IP/port combination! That was such a colossal waste of IP addresses.

Another thing that changed on the server side was that, thanks to AWS and the like, it became trivial to set up a massive private network. Nowadays you can have a cluster of thousands of virtual machines that communicate with one another entirely within a VPC. Only machines that need to communicate with external entities get a public IPv4 address. This kind of setup not only frees up a /20, but also has the benefit of being more secure.

Meanwhile, on the client side, the rise of mobile internet means that devices can no longer assume that it will have any given address for any length of time. Even if we had plenty of addresses to go around, like with IPv6, what can we do when the device moves across the country? It's easier to assign a new address than to try to route the old address to an entirely different ISP. Reducing the complexity of the routing table was one of the goals of IPv6, after all. Insisting on a unique and stable IP address for each mobile device would defeat that purpose.

As a result, most new applications are being built with the assumption that the IP address doesn't matter. You rent a few ports on someone else's IP for a few minutes to fire off a bunch of requests, just like you'd rent CPU cycles on someone else's machine to run some functions.