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Can you remember what year it was? I’ve got a slight suspicion you were given some bullshit or at least a creative treatment of facts e.g. everything had IPv6

Can you remember what year it was? I’ve got a slight suspicion you were given some bullshit or at least a creative treatment of facts e.g. everything had IPv6 support but FUD-filled network engineers didn’t want to turn it on. Most network devices I’ve encountered were dual-stack way before anyone I knew seemed to care about actually using IPv6 — I always assumed it was added for US government/military requirements.

jjoonathan 3y ago
Sure, everything supports IPv6 -- until you turn it on and rediscover the tickets that have been sitting at the bottom of the JIRA for the last decade.
- kaliszad 3y ago
  As a matter of fact Ron Broersma who affiliated with Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) has a list of equipment that should be fully IPv6-only compliant including various management interfaces and more. The US Navy supposedly tests this in house in a IPv6-only network. 4 years later I imagine the situation only got better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kQje5gSWw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kQje5gSWw8 Also, AWS now have the majority of NICs and switches built in-house I imagine. The underlay network could be IPv6 or totally custom for what we know (but probably is IPv4).
  - jjoonathan 3y ago
    Cool! I'm glad the military is pushing the internet forward, I guess some things never change :) As for AWS, I tend to agree with the sibling post and your supposition about IPv4. Everything out of the Amazon organization is aggressively, err, "minimal."
    - radicaldreamer 3y ago
      It's their baby lol
discodave 3y ago
From memory, the regionalization project ran from approx 2014 to 2015 or 2016. There were also other reasons given, like the amount of internal software that used e.g. IPv4 addresses. Also, AWS likes to have 'lots of small things' instead of one big thing (regions, AZs, cells, two pizza teams, no (official) monorepo) so regionalization was part of that. Another big reason for regionalization, other than IPv4 exhaustion was that AWS promises customers that AWS regions are completely seperate, but with one big giant network, it turns out there were all sorts of services making calls between regions that nobody had realized. I have a couple of funny examples, but that might make me too identifiable :)
- rekoil 3y ago
  Tell me more about these "pizza teams".
  - whoknew1122 3y ago
    The idea is internal teams should be no bigger than what can be fed by 2 pizzas.
    - lagniappe 3y ago
      But I don't like working alone :(
      - edvinbesic 3y ago
        slam dunk.
      - thelastparadise 3y ago
        Badum tsshhhh
    - NooneAtAll3 3y ago
      oh so they don't own 2 pizzerias? :(
    - 3y ago
thatsBs369 3y ago
Right, if you worked at Amazon and didn't have incentive, then, you didn't do it. It was part of your job to not do things which you were not incentivized to do.
- mtnGoat 3y ago
  Just change Amazon for any other company name and the sentence is still correct. People do they are paid to do.
paulddraper 3y ago
Right?? How old of a device you would have to get to NOT have IPv6 support? EDIT: But maybe bugs, IDK.
- kjs3 3y ago
  If Amazon is your customer, you fix the bugs; if you're Amazon using your in-house kit, you fix your own bugs whenever you want to. There are plenty of real reasons not to do IPv6, but they are virtually all politics and possibly operational ("we'd have to train our people, and we don't spend money on that"). The idea it was a vendor issue is a BS trope that's been around for at least a decade if not 2.
ketralnis 3y ago
> FUD-filled network engineers FUD sounds like a mean way to say unproven in production
jvolkman 3y ago
I believe the issue wasn't of IPv6 support generally, but of issues with TCAM space and the increase in routing table size moving from v4 to v6. Overflowing TCAM would cause routing to hit the CPU which would immediately lead to outages. Tables were relatively large internally because AWS was all in on clos networks at that point. And the devices used to build those clos networks were running Broadcom ASICs, not Cisco or other likely vendors.

jjoonathan 3y ago

Sure, everything supports IPv6 -- until you turn it on and rediscover the tickets that have been sitting at the bottom of the JIRA for the last decade.

kaliszad 3y ago
As a matter of fact Ron Broersma who affiliated with Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) has a list of equipment that should be fully IPv6-only compliant including various management interfaces and more. The US Navy supposedly tests this in house in a IPv6-only network. 4 years later I imagine the situation only got better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kQje5gSWw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kQje5gSWw8 Also, AWS now have the majority of NICs and switches built in-house I imagine. The underlay network could be IPv6 or totally custom for what we know (but probably is IPv4).
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  Cool! I'm glad the military is pushing the internet forward, I guess some things never change :) As for AWS, I tend to agree with the sibling post and your supposition about IPv4. Everything out of the Amazon organization is aggressively, err, "minimal."
  - radicaldreamer 3y ago
    It's their baby lol

discodave 3y ago

From memory, the regionalization project ran from approx 2014 to 2015 or 2016. There were also other reasons given, like the amount of internal software that used e.g. IPv4 addresses. Also, AWS likes to have 'lots of small things' instead of one big thing (regions, AZs, cells, two pizza teams, no (official) monorepo) so regionalization was part of that. Another big reason for regionalization, other than IPv4 exhaustion was that AWS promises customers that AWS regions are completely seperate, but with one big giant network, it turns out there were all sorts of services making calls between regions that nobody had realized. I have a couple of funny examples, but that might make me too identifiable :)

rekoil 3y ago
Tell me more about these "pizza teams".
- whoknew1122 3y ago
  The idea is internal teams should be no bigger than what can be fed by 2 pizzas.
  - lagniappe 3y ago
    But I don't like working alone :(
    - edvinbesic 3y ago
      slam dunk.
    - thelastparadise 3y ago
      Badum tsshhhh
  - NooneAtAll3 3y ago
    oh so they don't own 2 pizzerias? :(
  - 3y ago

thatsBs369 3y ago

Right, if you worked at Amazon and didn't have incentive, then, you didn't do it. It was part of your job to not do things which you were not incentivized to do.

mtnGoat 3y ago
Just change Amazon for any other company name and the sentence is still correct. People do they are paid to do.

paulddraper 3y ago

Right?? How old of a device you would have to get to NOT have IPv6 support? EDIT: But maybe bugs, IDK.

kjs3 3y ago
If Amazon is your customer, you fix the bugs; if you're Amazon using your in-house kit, you fix your own bugs whenever you want to. There are plenty of real reasons not to do IPv6, but they are virtually all politics and possibly operational ("we'd have to train our people, and we don't spend money on that"). The idea it was a vendor issue is a BS trope that's been around for at least a decade if not 2.

ketralnis 3y ago

> FUD-filled network engineers FUD sounds like a mean way to say unproven in production

jvolkman 3y ago

I believe the issue wasn't of IPv6 support generally, but of issues with TCAM space and the increase in routing table size moving from v4 to v6. Overflowing TCAM would cause routing to hit the CPU which would immediately lead to outages. Tables were relatively large internally because AWS was all in on clos networks at that point. And the devices used to build those clos networks were running Broadcom ASICs, not Cisco or other likely vendors.