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AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

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Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#311

Post by simiones »

speedgoose wrote: post #250
shawabawa3 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter what change you make, or how you make it, if you are making more than 4B addresses routable then any existing IPv4 device will not be able to route some addresses, so you will have caused a split in the internet This is a fundamental and unresolvable problem with "making it backwards compatible"

Wouldn't NAT be an existing and well used solution to this problem?

Even if we accept that NAT is the right solution, it still is pretty limited in how far it has been able to extend the address space, since port numbers only give you two extra bytes of address space. And there are no further extra bytes to stuff somehwere else in a TCP or UDP packet header.

Of course, we could extend the address space by further breaking the layering of routes, and baking in support for higher layer protocols into routers. We can certainly stuff more address information in HTTP headers, so the web could be extended to essentially arbitrary size by simply requiring routers to look not just at source and destination IPs and source/dest TCP/UDP port numbers, but also client and server HTTP headers. SIP looks a lot like HTTP, so the same solution could work there. TLS already has support for additional headers, so we could also do extra NAT at that layer.

Hell, AWS could then use a single IPv4, and just rely on HTTP/SIP headers or TLS extension headers to know the actual destination! Of course, if you want to run another L7 protocol, tough luck - tunneling it is for you.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#312

Post by Dobbs »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #86
preisschild wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame your ISP. IPv6 should have already been supported since the 2000s.

Then there are a lot of ISPs to blame: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

That is a really nice chart, thanks for sharing.

What is confusing me is the Netherlands. We only have about 13% adoption. I'm on one of the largest ISPs KPN and get 10/10 on IPv6 tests. Is this because I use a custom router? I'd expect it to be a lot higher since apparently KPN supports IPv6.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#313

Post by yrro »

Sesse__ wrote: post #249
ta1243 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't ipv6 (even with the tons of extra features that ipv6 forces upon you). One major problem is dual stack. It doubles the workload for very limited benefit. You have all the downsides of making ipv4 work in the first place. You've then got all sorts of messes like NAT66 (ipv6 was supposed to get rid of NAT), a lack of clarity on which patch to use (NPTv6 and NAT66 are two different options for the same…

> Instead had the approach been ipv6 only from the start, with no dual-stack, having the OS transparently deal with sockets to ipv4 devices by converting to the ipv6 mapped address (:ffff:xxxxxxx), and thus eliminating the need for dual stack from the start, things would have moved far far faster. This is, indeed, how dual-stack works; you open a PF_INET6 socket and use sockaddr_in6 addresses for everything, includin…

Don't forget you may need to opt in to get mapping to work. It's not available by default on all platforms.

If you're unlucky you'll also have to sacrifice a goat to appease the JVM gods. JVM behaviours vary hugely across implementation, version and underlying platform. Not to mention the short sighted decision made by many sysadmins to disable IPv6 completely...

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#314

Post by Macha »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #147
welterde wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That document has been going around for ages and is based on the same fundamental misunderstanding that one somehow can extend IPv4 in a way somehow, but remain compatible with IPv4-only clients. This is just not possible. Most of the other criticism is not relevant anymore, since we now have a lot of transition technologies that allow IPv6 clients to interoperate with IPv4 servers (this way around is possible since…

> Overall we are now much further into the IPv6 migration than djb ever envisioned. That post was written 20 years ago . I would hope that the migration would be more than "much further along", I'd have hoped it had been completed, like a decade ago. > is based on the same fundamental misunderstanding that one somehow can extend IPv4 in a way somehow, but remain compatible with IPv4-only clients I'm not a network eng…

> That post was written 20 years ago. I would hope that the migration would be more than "much further along", I'd have hoped it had been completed, like a decade ago.

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

Yes, the IPv6 migration has taken much longer than anyone expected. But this argument would have made more sense in 2015 when we were looking at 5% IPv6 deployment and very erratic growth. But it's not, we've been looking at 10% of the market gaining IPv6 support for the last 3 years and are now at 45%. Now granted, this is likely to be largely "new" devices, e.g. in mobile networks and in countries like India where these were hidden behind CGNAT before. But these are exactly the type of devices that an IPv4 extension header couldn't have reached either.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#315

Post by Macha »

csomar wrote: post #111
bradley13 wrote: post #93

Can we go back in time and hit the designers of IPv6 upside the head? The decision not to make IPv6 backwards compatible, the belief that a beautiful new standard could magically replace something already so widespread... "Naive" is an inadequate word. We are still futzing with the transition 3 decades later, with no end in sight. Grrr, grumble...

Yeah, I never got any of the articles about how well IPv6 is designed. Any article will get me confused about whether an IPv6 address is a range, a computer, a router, or something that points to a resource inside my computer. (I guess it's all of these things?). But the biggest problems of all: You can write an IPv4 address on a phone call. You might be even able to remember it. Not the case for IPv6, you need to be…

The amount of "account numbers" I have that are in fact alphanumeric with various services suggests that these companies (utility companies, banks, etc.) don't consider this a problem.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#316

Post by forty »

dale_glass wrote: post #182
yardstick wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NAT64? No what we needed was NAT66, and it took over a decade after IPv4 to deliver this. Because the IPv6 advocates were too opinionated on exactly how IPv6 should work. And since when has the world even agreed to anything even remotely complicated without trying to change things up?

No, NAT needs to be shot into the sun. It's absolutely not needed under IPv6.

Why? It seems useful to hide details of your private network from everyone

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#317

Post by mschuster91 »

circuit10 wrote: post #299
mschuster91 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It requires us all to ration a resource (namely numbers) that should be near-infinite and essentially free. There can only be ~4.3 billion IPv4 addresses, which means that mathematically IP addresses are severely limited - you can't assign even one single globally routable IPv4 address per human. That's why we have NAT and its evolution CGNAT in the first place.

That’s their point, if there were more addresses we wouldn’t need to

Back when the Internet was conceived, as a network of militaries, universities and large corporations, it was in no way foreseeable just how much resources humanity would need - and it was thought that the system would adapt.

However we got layers upon layers of closed-source middleboxes and everything ossified as a result.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#319

Post by epolanski »

fastball wrote: post #160
epolanski wrote: post #158

ELI5, why are IPv4 addresses so precious?

Because there are only 4.3B of them possible, and we've not done the best job of migrating to IPv6. Said another way, AWS owns approximately 3% of all IPv4 addresses.

I understand that they are limited, but that doesn't explain why are they sought after?

Essentially, how are they better than IPv6 addresses?

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#320

Post by MereInterest »

rewmie wrote: post #275
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem isn't ipv6 (even with the tons of extra features that ipv6 forces upon you) The year is 2023, The chromium engine is full blown operating system, it has notifications, background task management, GPU acceleration for general compute, it's larger than Windows XP, and can in fact run windows XP in the browser. Teams consumes 500 mb of ram to do the same job ICQ did in 2002 with 5 mb of ram. Cars have 4G,…

> But Ipv6 features take a few extra bytes and are a problem. Some people pay for each extra byte they have to send through a network, and design whole systems around the goal of minimizing the amount of data they ship around. No one pays for the extra free gigabyte that Chrome takes over.

> No one pays for the extra free gigabyte that Chrome takes over.

Sure they do. It just doesn’t show up in Chrome’s metrics so Chrome doesn’t care about it.

* Start-up time of other applications. If a program needs 1 GB of RAM, and Chrome is holding all but 512 MB, then the program must perform multiple allocations, waiting for Chrome to release its cache after each one.

* Smaller cache in other programs. Consider a program that can run with 4 MB of RAM, but could use up to 1 GB of RAM to cache intermediate results and improve performance. Such a program would check the amount of RAM available and scale their own cache size accordingly.

* Competing caches in multiple Chrome instances. Multiple independent Chrome instances, such as from Electron shells, each try to cache as much as possible until RAM is exhausted.

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