14 ms·

AWS charge for using IPv4 expected to bring $1B/year and speed up IPv6 adoption

204 points by simonpure 3y ago

ckdarby 3y ago
My hope was they'd charge for the IPs, but would drop the cost of NATs. I can't believe the cost of NATs! If you're running in triple AZs that is 3 nats you're paying for.
- simpsond 3y ago
  You can technically route through one if you can tolerate that. But I agree. They just got more expensive.
halJordan 3y ago
I'm speaking from ignorance of course. But ipv6 has been the acknowledged next best thing for the Internet's health by everyone. Everyone gives lip service. But when actual hard steps to bring forth this common good are taken everyone breaks out the "greedy corpos" trope, the "I'm a sovereign citizen you can't take my ips from me" trope. I'd be happy if the HackerNews typers would just end the affectations; in either direction. But this teeth-gnashing is such an incredibly garish instance of NIMBY-ism, it's unbecoming.
dboreham 3y ago
Adoption is limited by retail ISPs that refuse to roll out IPv6. But my AMZN stock thanks them.
- ninkendo 3y ago
  This is measurably false. Google’s IPv6 adoption graph has noticeable spikes on the weekends when people use their home internet, and decreases during the work week when people go to work: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html Adoption is limited by enterprises who are change-averse and already entrenched in ipv4. Residential ISP’s have made much more progress.
- Filligree 3y ago
  Mine has supported IPv6 for years- But I refuse to let them switch me, because their IPv6 offer does not include a v4 address, only CGNAT. Of course if everyone was on v6 that wouldn't matter, but until then I need the ability to forward ports to my server! This isn't even technically in breach of the ToS; I have a business line, mostly for the customer support. And thus I add to the problem, because now anyone who wants to connect to said server also needs a v4 option...
  - antongribok 3y ago
    I am honestly curious, what do you run on your server that you can't connect to with Tailscale?
    - nfriedly 3y ago
      Not the person you're asking, but hosting a game server is one example where you probably wouldn't want to go through Tailscale, due to the added latency. A Plex server might be another one if Tailscale has bandwidth limits. (I could be wrong here - I'm on a static IP, so I've never used Tailscale) Also, in general, it just adds a layer of complexity that I wouldn't want to deal with if I didn't have to.
      - rootusrootus 3y ago
        > if Tailscale has bandwidth limits. (I could be wrong here - I'm on a static IP, so I've never used Tailscale) Tailscale connections are primarily peer to peer. The service Tailscale is providing is orchestrating the connectivity and hiding the complexity, but the data flows directly.
        zinekeller 3y ago
        Except that P2P mode tends to simply not work in cases where both of the clients are in CGNAT networks (unless both of them happens to have IPv6 addresses). Even Tailscale acknowledges this sad fact (https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works#have-you-considered-giving-up https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works#have-you-...) because in practice CGNAT operators deploy an endpoint-dependent NAT (aka symmetric NAT) without the possibility of port mapping.
- lostapathy 3y ago
  My current (Brightspeed) and previous (Spectrum) ISPs have nominally "supported" IPv6. Except ... not nationwide, there are regional differences in how it's done and how well it works. And nobody can tell me if my specific location is supported or how to configure my equipment to use it. On one hand, that gives me hope that we're getting closer to near-universal ISP support. On the other hand, it's been like this for so long I question if it'll ever improve.
- zokier 3y ago
  Crusty enterprise networks are far bigger problem than retail ISPs. This is clearly visible by the fact that you have clear weekend peaks in e.g. Googles IPv6 adoption stats.
ranger_danger 3y ago
Maybe in 20 years my local ISP monopoly will start to roll out IPv6.
- b112 3y ago
  Mine rolled it out more than a decade ago, had nothing but problems, shrugged, and removed it. Sadly, I think they're more hesitant now.
throw0101d 3y ago
Two days ago: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205515
- p1mrx 3y ago
  Direct link to the list of IKEA products you can spell with an IPv6 address: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39209844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39209844
ipshii 3y ago
What! that's insane! if true
ramshanker 3y ago
I hope we see a not-so-subtle jump in usage on google ipv6 tracker. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html Anecdote, my ISP gives us IPv6 but not my employer. We use the IT equipment till the last breadth. I have seen, permanent table-fan running towards Floor's network hub. I guess that one is NOT IPv6 ready. :D
- wongarsu 3y ago
  I doubt it. Realistically the AWS charge mostly causes companies to stop giving IPv4 addresses to servers that never directly talk to customers. As a knock-on effect this will cause tooling to become more IPv6 aware, and put pressure on SaaS in infrastructure monitoring and dev tooling to be reachable via IPv6 (for example this might cause github to finally fix their IPv6 game because of higher customer demand). Maybe companies use the same opportunity to make sure their services also work via IPv6. But they won't stop offering their services on IPv4, and AWS changes don't put meaningful pressure on ISPs to roll out IPv6. If anything it will reduce the pressure on the price of IPv4 addresses, making it more viable for ISPs to hold out.
  - zinekeller 3y ago
    > will cause tooling to become more IPv6 aware I doubt it, especially that there is an option of using private/CGNAT ranges instead of adopting a whole new protocol. Everyone who cares about IPv6 have already done their part, and people who don't care about it will likely use the lower-friction option, and between private IPv4 networks and IPv6 I bet that a lot of people will see private IPv4 as a lower-friction option.
    - wongarsu 3y ago
      However the lowest friction option is to use private IPv4 between your servers, but give every server a public IPv6 it can use for outgoing calls: updating the OS, fetching github repositories, collecting logs on your favorite SaaS, etc. Of course you can do all this via IPv4 by setting up proxies or gateways, but that's more work and more moving pieces than checking the checkbox that you want a public IPv6 and having it just work ... provided everyone you want to talk to talks IPv6.
ceejayoz 3y ago
Maybe Amazon can start? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/load-balancer-ip-address-type.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/appl... > You can configure your Application Load Balancer so that clients can communicate with the load balancer using IPv4 addresses only, or using both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses (dualstack). I'd love to go IPv6 only. Amazon won't let me, and charges for the privilege. Look at the list of "no"s on https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ipv6-support.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ipv6-su....
- vander_elst 3y ago
  Last time I checked GitHub was also an offender.
- troupe 3y ago
  My guess is that going IPV6 only for load balancers would make it break for enough people that AWS thinks it would reflect poorly on their service.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    That seems unlikely given that the vast majority of users have no clue what the underlying service provider is for the web services they're using, and those who do know are savvy enough to understand the difference between an AWS issue and a configuration issue.
    - troupe 3y ago
      Imagine if Cloudflare went to IPV6 only. Yes, Cloudflare's customers should know what that means, but the end users that are using the service may not be and if the error in anyway says Cloudflare, then it gives Cloudflare a bad reputation. While AWS is a bit (just a bit) more removed from the end user than Cloudflare, there is still the potential for it not being good PR.
      - 3y ago
dark-star 3y ago
Awesome move. It's about time! This might give IPv6 the final push it needs to convince the last few ISPs who are still stuck on IPv4-only
- zanfr 3y ago
  there is no clear benefit to most users tho
  - mjhay 3y ago
    In the US, usually not - but the US is comparatively spoiled for IPv4 blocks. It's pretty common in a lot of places for ISP customers to share public-facing IPs. This causes all sorts of issues with people being unfairly spam blacklisted, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT
    - nfriedly 3y ago
      Even my (US) ISP defaults everyone to CGNAT.
  - redserk 3y ago
    Households with multiple Nintendo Switch and I think the PS5 consoles (I may be mixing this up with Xbox) would significantly benefit. Some games assume there’s only one console per public IP, and expects ports NAT forwarded as such. Giving each end-user an IPv6 prefix completely solves that mess.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      Up until the games start limiting things to a single IPv6 prefix, of course.
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    It makes setting up a home server much easier, because you can get infinite free static IPs. That doesn't contradict that "most users" don't benefit, though.
xhkkffbf 3y ago
At what point do these numbers start to be like a crypto currency? But one with real utility?
- bluGill 3y ago
  They already are, but it is a risky investment - the higher the price goes the more people switch to IPv6 and thus the lower the value goes. Eventually there will be a tipping point where people realize they don't care about IPv4 and quickly the value will go to zero.
- lightweb 3y ago
  Check this out. IPV6 integrated with Bitcoin generated addressing. Every packet gets a unique address. Security implications are profound. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.15842.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.15842.pdf
mrweasel 3y ago
This could also slow down IPv6 adoption. This is going to free up a ton of IPv4 addresses, reducing the need for AWS to purchase new ranges. I know of a few companies that started auditing their public IPv4 usage on AWS after the original announcement. Some AWS customers have released 80+% of their public IPv4 addresses. The alternative isn't IPv6, it's private addresses. Many AWS customers have been slapping public IPs on EC2 instance just because they could or because they didn't know any better.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  Customers having to switch to private addressing still seems like more pressure than customers having infinite free public addresses was providing, not less. I.e. address exhaustion pressure isn't only about the complete inability to buy an IP it's about how much work you have to do to use IPv4 addresses.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    It depends on how you measure IPv6 adoption. Is it about your ability as consumer to use only IPv6, or your ability to offer a website reachable only via IPv6. AWS charging for IPv4 will help with the former, because companies now have more of a reason to care about IPv6. But it might delay the latter, because fewer IPs wasted on internal servers means less price pressure on useful IPv4 use by ISPs, giving those that still hold out less financial incentive to change anything.
    - kees99 3y ago
      IMHO, best way to measure IPv6 adoption would be - what percentage of your website's visitors are able to reach your IPv6-only site. That percentage should be well above 99% for a popular website operator to even consider going IPv6-only; needless to say, in most markets, this figure is way lower, with no clear path to improving.
      - eastbound 3y ago
        It doesn’t help that, if you enable IPv6 in Debian, the network becomes extremely slow for many things. The reason? If first tries to reach all domains with IPv6, times out, then use IPv4. Of course that’s because I didn’t successfully configure IPv6 with the network, but on the other hand, IPv4 only was successful at first try.
zanfr 3y ago
while I could set up v6 I just wont for a while... when I do I expect things to be better documented
- wongarsu 3y ago
  I've defaulted to setting up v6, but deactivating it once it causes trouble. I don't want to actively sink time into it, but in 95% it just works out of the box (or with obvious config changes, like adding an IPv6 listening port and an AAAA DNS entry), and in those cases I'm happy to let it stay until it causes trouble. In another 10 years it's probably worth putting more effort into the other cases as well, but so far I'm happy with getting 80% of the way there for 0.1% of the effort.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    Yeah, IPv6 is shut off on my Google Fiber router. Stuff on the Internet breaks when it’s on (last tested three or so months back when they sent me a new router). When we first got Fiber, years ago, Amazon’s store was one of the things that broke until I turned off IPv6. Wouldn’t load at all, on any device on our network. Works fine for VPNs and such, but I don’t talk to the Internet with it, because my experience has been it’s terribly unreliable.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      I'm curious what breaks with IPv6 on. I've been running IPv6 dual stack for over a decade at home and pretty much never have any issues. I think I've run into a prefix change get bugged on my router's announcements that required a reboot, but that's like 2 times in the last 10+ years and I'm not 100% sure that was truly the issue. My phone is pretty much always has an IPv6 address and pretty much never has IP-related connectivity problems. I'm not using Google Fiber's router though, so that could be the complication.
      - wharvle 3y ago
        The typical behavior is that DNS returns an IPv6 address, then whatever-it-is sits there until a timeout, because it’s simply not being routed. I’ve not investigated further because turning off IPv6 fixes the problem and breaks nothing (that I care about). Anything that only returns an IPv4 address from DNS works either way. My cellular connection supports IPv6, but testing sites report it’s misconfigured in a bunch of ways. I don’t see problems in practice, though. But on my home network, it’s turned off.
j4yav 3y ago
They should donate the billion to projects that accelerate the transition.
- b112 3y ago
  Only when companies (who are for profit), and ISPs (who are for profit) buy new hardware, and config it for ipv6, will change come. Projects aren't the real problem.
  - idatum 3y ago
    For my ISP, it's not just about the hardware, it's their provisioning software that needed replacing. It has to be simple for their support to understand how IPv6 is given to customers.
  - patmorgan23 3y ago
    IPv6 has been around for 30 years and well supported by switching and routing vendors for 20. What hardware is out there today that does not support v6?
    - b112 3y ago
      Crappy hardware? My point is, software typically isn't the problem.
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nromiun 3y ago
If anyone wants to use GitHub from their IPv6 only VMs I would recommend a SSH reverse tunnel. It works like this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/116191/give-server-access-to-internet-via-client-connecting-by-ssh https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/116191/give-server-...
- zokier 3y ago
  You don't actually need ssh tunnel here though, you can just connect directly to the proxy server?
  - nromiun 3y ago
    In this case the PC is the proxy, which sometimes does not have a public IP address (behind ISP NAT).
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    Some sort of NAT64 is probably a better idea, because that applies below the TLS layer. When people complain about IPv6 and IPv4 being incompatible, the fact that you can establish a cross-protocol TCP+TLS session with just a NAT is a remarkable counterexample. It could've been a lot worse.
    - zokier 3y ago
      Sure, there never was a shortage of different ipv4/ipv6 transition/interop mechanisms. Problem has been that many of them haven't been all that great, and understanding the use-cases, compromises, and tradeoffs between the options can be very difficult, especially when vendors and operators like to tout their own tech. To this day I'm not sure what are the best options available now for different scenarios. 4rd/MAP-T/MAP-E/464XLAT/Dslite, nat64/siit/a+p, these things are enough to get your head spinning
      - p1mrx 3y ago
        "Reality has a surprising amount of detail"
yesimahuman 3y ago
Hoping this lights a fire under other AWS wrappers like Heroku and Vercel to support IPv6. Currently dealing with the fallout of the Supabase IPv6 change and frustrated that two of my core vendors still don't support it.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
>expected to bring $1B/year Yes. >and speed up IPv6 Fucking lol. It's still not enough of a financial hit for people to want to deal with IPv6. Should have just come up with a better protocol in the first place. That's what really would have stimulated adoption.
- Borg3 3y ago
  Something like this? http://borg.uu3.net/~borg/?ipv6 http://borg.uu3.net/~borg/?ipv6
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    > keep ARP, ND wasn't a great idea after all there's nothing wrong with ND and it addresses several security vulnerabilities, namely ARP cache poisoning. But the real reason why ARP was removed is because it's a layering violation. > NAT support (because it's everywhere these days) nothing at all is stopping you from doing NAT on IPv6, except for the fact that everyone hates NAT, even people that pretend that they like it. > Correct DHCP support (SLAAC wasn't a great idea after all) SLAAC is a great thing. Also, DHCPv6 also exists, which allows you to do exactly what DHCP lets you do. Android doesn't support DHCPv6, but that's not IPv6s fault. - IPv6->IPv4 interop (one way) There's no such thing as one-way communication if we're talking TCP. Besides, it's still fundamentally impossible if the other end has no idea what to do with the source address.
    - betaby 3y ago
      DHCPv6 doesn't support dhcpv6 forwarding though like dhcpv4 does. One can't forward dhcpv6 request over multiple ipv6 hops, only hop-by-hop forwarding supported to my knowledge.
    - Borg3 3y ago
      There are several IPv6 -> IPv4 interops (bridges) developed already. All of them appeard due to slow IPv6 adoption. Some of them are: NAT64, XLAT6, DS-Lite. Never heard about ND tables overflows? They fixed one thing, broken another. ARP poisoning is mostly fixed problem. I like NAT myself. Im dualhomed (el-cheapo), using policy routing and NAT. Everything works like a charm. I cant imagine such setup w/o NAT actually. SLAAC might be great thing for you, but not for others. This is why IPv6 is such a failure. Instead of creating simple protocol to meet middle ground, they slapped together annoying techs for specific cases like IoT. Great job.
nimbius 3y ago
imo the 'static' ip issue with ipv6 has not been solved by providers. cable internet cabals are content to use dhcpv6 to dole prefixes out, but these are the same providers whos DNS servers typically post four-digit latency figures for DNS queries so the idea they they are to be the ones to solve DHCPv4's scalability issues remains laughable. just try getting a statically assigned prefix from their "business" or "corporate" offerings. wont happen. SLAAC is the best hope so far, but regular hosted customers do not understand that slaac is calculated by mac, so theyll need education to ensure immutable architectures dont crash and burn on lift-and-shift redeployments. either that, or enjoy hardcoding ip's in your prefix to the boxes. then theres networking. most corporate network engineering that would handle ingress or peer traffic to clouds (especially azure tenants) treat ipv6 as a cursory knowledge...something theyre aware of in theory but have never taken it upon themselves to practice. i predict AWS will send a lot of them scrambling for mouldy ccna texts and taking down the hybrid cloud at least twice a month until the basics sink in. and finally, firewall and security devices. There are a lot of vendors that have gotten a free pass to grandstand about how stellar their IPv6 support is, only to send customers to phone tree purgatory trying to find support for a device that either cant route between local, unique local, special purpose ranges, ::1, or even the special discard ranges for things like DDoS protection. frankly its not an AWS issue (yet) but the only guise ive seen handle this competently are...cloudflare.
cdelsolar 3y ago
I still have no idea what IPv6 actually is or how it works, or how a router can be IPv4 or IPv6 only, etc.
- p1mrx 3y ago
  By what method did you learn what IPv4 is and how it works?
deleted 3y ago
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szundi 3y ago
How nice they are to move the world forward, thanks
deleted 3y ago
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dpedu 3y ago
Could anybody recommend a book for learning IPv6? I know there are plenty out there, but what are the best, HN's recommendations? I get the general concepts and I use it on personal systems but I've spent too long just skirting by. It's time for a deep dive. I think the best type of book to learn from would have a mix of textbook knowledge and practical examples/demos.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  The CCENT and CCNA certification books have chapters dedicated to IPv6 and I think they do a good job talking about it. edit: Some little tips about it. * The smallest subnet should be /64. Anyone making a smaller subnet than that is doing it wrong (looking at you, every ISP that assigns me an address) * Subnets should be created in four-bit chunks. You should always make /64, /60, /56, etc. for readability. That's because 4 bits make up one hex character in the address. * If you want to have private (non-internet-routable) IPv6 space, create a ULA. https://www.unique-local-ipv6.com/ https://www.unique-local-ipv6.com/ Imagine never having to worry about address overlap with VPNs or routing between two internal networks.
  - infensus 3y ago
    This a thing which boggles my mind. Does this mean everyone gets /64 addresses to circumvent IP bans?
    - unethical_ban 3y ago
      IPv6 banning would likely happen at that subnet level, not individually.
      - infensus 3y ago
        Ah right. But it will be a bit problematic, since the subnet size may vary between different ISPs, no?
        3y ago
exabrial 3y ago
What benefit does ipv6 bring to the every day user?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- matja 3y ago
  What's an "every day user"? Maybe some P2P applications will magically start working or have lower startup time because of no need for STUN/TURN/ICE for NAT traversal.
- aquaticsunset 3y ago
  Their devices continue to work when a scarce resource is no longer plentiful. The every day user doesn't need to care, but the people working on the stuff the every day user has need to care.
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  IPv6 has marginally lower latency (in most cases) and lets peer-to-peer applications work flawlessly. If your ISP only has v4 CG-NAT then it gets you a lot better connectivity.
- supertrope 3y ago
  Any kind of application that acts as a server needs a direct IP connection. Gamers get errors about "strict NAT." Traditionally the solution to this problem caused by NAT was to forward the ports. If their ISPs has chosen CGNAT port forwarding is impossible. VoIP calls that have one way audio are a symptom of reachability issues caused by a firewall or address translation problems. VoIP services have adapted to IPv4 NAT by relying on proxying instead of STUN but CGNAT really degrades reliability. Smaller newer ISPs that can't obtain one IPv4 address per household are incurring significant CGNAT costs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624 Video chat uses the kludges of TURN when peer to peer connectivity does not work. This increases costs for the video chat service who in turn require a paid subscription as they will not relay traffic for free. BitTorrent and file transfer services need direct IP connectivity. If p2p file transfers worked on any network we would not need to mind Gmail's 25MB attachment limit, or pay for intermediary cloud storage.
jgalt212 3y ago
AWS fees are $3.6/mo. Not to defend AWS, but Verizon business wanted $20/mo for a static public IP address.
linux_devil 3y ago
Aws Kinesis and other services dont even support IPV6 to start with , how are they speeding up IPV6 adoption
krupan 3y ago
People, IPv6 was introduced 28 years ago! For some reason it is not catching on and probably never will. Let’s try something else. EDIT: my take on IPv6 is this. In the early 2000’s I wanted to run a web server at home. Figuring out how to make my $10 gateway/router do port forwarding was hard. IPv6 sounded like the right solution. Now… none of those problems really exist
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  64 bits is too many bits. honestly could have slapped a country+area code in front and gained a few hundred IPv4 addresses per person.
  - lajamerr 3y ago
    128 bits*
- hcarvalhoalves 3y ago
  > For some reason it is not catching on and probably never will. If a major player is making $1B out of it "not catching on", I agree it never will.
  - krupan 3y ago
    So that started very recently in the history of IPv6, no? And if IPv6 is so awesome, how are they convincing people to pay for IPv4??
    - Dagger2 3y ago
      ...network effects? There are still people with legacy v4-only clients, which can never reach anything other than v4, or on v4-only ISPs. There are enough of them at the moment that we still need to support them. This isn't hard to figure out.
jsz0 3y ago
IPv6 has been such a wild ride. About 7 years ago there was a big IPv4 depletion scare when ARIN made it harder to obtain IPv4. I did a bunch of dual stack deployments for customers around this time. In subsequent years quite a few of them ended up paying us to come back in and un-deploy IPv6 as their network engineers or often 'the IT guy' neglected to maintain firewall rules and access-lists leading to major security issues. I can't really think of any other vital technology like this that has rotted on the vine and had so many false starts.
jrockway 3y ago
I am not sure if these incentives help IPv6 adoption. Nobody can turn off IPv4 today; there is always a long tail of people with broken IPv6 stacks. Since IPv4 continues to work, I'm not even sure it's worth setting up IPv6 so that someday you can switch IPv4 off; do work that gets you customers today, switch off of IPv4 when it becomes a crisis. I think the best incentive would be a high price on IPv4-only, but if you do the work to support dual-stack, then that fee is waived. That way, there is savings for doing the technical work today, and you pave the way for a brighter future. Personally, I think I'd pay the fee to not be dual stack these days. Everything in your infrastructure has to now check two things. Your website uptime checker has to probe via both IPv4 and IPv6. You have to maintain two sets of firewall rules. You have to remember to "ping -6 example.com" in addition to "ping example.com" when checking connectivity. I don't think it's worth the effort, and I say that as someone who first made their website available over IPv6 in like 2008. (I moved providers in 2020 and the new one didn't have IPv6. It made me sad. But now it's just one less thing to worry about.)
- viraptor 3y ago
  > Nobody can turn off IPv4 today ... for all services. There are internal servers talking to other servers which don't need ipv4. There's zerotier that gives you a private IPv6 network regardless of your network capabilities. The only part that actually still requires ipv4 is the general public user.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Sure, but internal servers talking to internal servers can also do so on private IPv4s, which are free. So, no need to bother with IPv6 and its myriad complexities just for that.
    - viraptor 3y ago
      Not always. Sometimes you talk between different providers, or to private endpoints on other services. Or its simpler use IPv6 between two networks rather than keep a global list of ipv4 ranges to make sure they don't collide.
CaffeinatedDev 3y ago
Amazon itself is a large user of AWS, is this taken into account when surmising the $1B/year figure?
beoberha 3y ago
I wonder how much of the IPv4 space is used for infra that could just be privately addressed with some reworking of network topology. I find these articles on HN focus much more heavily on consumer use of IPv4 for simple things like web browsing. But not a lot of consideration is paid to massive corporate systems and API surfaces. Would be interesting to know.
- wmf 3y ago
  I think this is what's really going to happen in AWS. People will audit their IP usage, discover that 90% doesn't need public addresses, and clean up their network. VPC more or less forces a combination of private addresses and NAT anyway and a clean VPC only needs a handful of public addresses. They don't need to deploy IPv6 and they're not going to.
josteink 3y ago
Sorry for being off-topic, but the utterly lacking IPv6 availability (still!) annoys me so much. I know IPv6. I can route it. I can setup networks with it. And my ISP supports it, but just kinda. For some arcane reason, it only supports it for some types of transport. Got Cable/Coax internet? Great! You get IPv6 and a subnet too! Got Fiber to the Home? You get IPv4. And no subnet. I'm in the latter segment, and I just don't get it. The ISP in question is Telia, a pretty big ISP in Scandinavia. If someone in the know-how could tell me at least why they're doing things like this, that might offer some mental consolation.
- wmf 3y ago
  Probably just broken equipment.
fennecbutt 3y ago
This is just more $ in Amazon pockets don't be proud of them for this at all.
- webworker 3y ago
  Yeah I'm not thrilled. This means I have to re-build some of my servers on Lightsail to pick a IPv6 only stack, it looks.
bsdpufferfish 3y ago
when a technology is so good, you have to force other people to use it
jiggawatts 3y ago
Meanwhile, Azure is gearing up to do the same thing. Except that their alternative to per-VM addresses is a NAT gateway that isn’t zone-redundant. Literally everything else is — including IP addresses and virtual networks — but not outbound Internet access. That’s going to just break and leave your entire network dead in the water if one of three zones has a hiccup. IPv6 can’t replace this garbage fast enough…

204 points by simonpure 3y ago

My hope was they'd charge for the IPs, but would drop the cost of NATs. I can't believe the cost of NATs! If you're running in triple AZs that is 3 nats you're paying for.

simpsond 3y ago
You can technically route through one if you can tolerate that. But I agree. They just got more expensive.

halJordan 3y ago

I'm speaking from ignorance of course. But ipv6 has been the acknowledged next best thing for the Internet's health by everyone. Everyone gives lip service. But when actual hard steps to bring forth this common good are taken everyone breaks out the "greedy corpos" trope, the "I'm a sovereign citizen you can't take my ips from me" trope. I'd be happy if the HackerNews typers would just end the affectations; in either direction. But this teeth-gnashing is such an incredibly garish instance of NIMBY-ism, it's unbecoming.

dboreham 3y ago

Adoption is limited by retail ISPs that refuse to roll out IPv6. But my AMZN stock thanks them.

ninkendo 3y ago
This is measurably false. Google’s IPv6 adoption graph has noticeable spikes on the weekends when people use their home internet, and decreases during the work week when people go to work: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html Adoption is limited by enterprises who are change-averse and already entrenched in ipv4. Residential ISP’s have made much more progress.
Filligree 3y ago
Mine has supported IPv6 for years- But I refuse to let them switch me, because their IPv6 offer does not include a v4 address, only CGNAT. Of course if everyone was on v6 that wouldn't matter, but until then I need the ability to forward ports to my server! This isn't even technically in breach of the ToS; I have a business line, mostly for the customer support. And thus I add to the problem, because now anyone who wants to connect to said server also needs a v4 option...
- antongribok 3y ago
  I am honestly curious, what do you run on your server that you can't connect to with Tailscale?
  - nfriedly 3y ago
    Not the person you're asking, but hosting a game server is one example where you probably wouldn't want to go through Tailscale, due to the added latency. A Plex server might be another one if Tailscale has bandwidth limits. (I could be wrong here - I'm on a static IP, so I've never used Tailscale) Also, in general, it just adds a layer of complexity that I wouldn't want to deal with if I didn't have to.
    - rootusrootus 3y ago
      > if Tailscale has bandwidth limits. (I could be wrong here - I'm on a static IP, so I've never used Tailscale) Tailscale connections are primarily peer to peer. The service Tailscale is providing is orchestrating the connectivity and hiding the complexity, but the data flows directly.
      - zinekeller 3y ago
        Except that P2P mode tends to simply not work in cases where both of the clients are in CGNAT networks (unless both of them happens to have IPv6 addresses). Even Tailscale acknowledges this sad fact (https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works#have-you-considered-giving-up https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works#have-you-...) because in practice CGNAT operators deploy an endpoint-dependent NAT (aka symmetric NAT) without the possibility of port mapping.
lostapathy 3y ago
My current (Brightspeed) and previous (Spectrum) ISPs have nominally "supported" IPv6. Except ... not nationwide, there are regional differences in how it's done and how well it works. And nobody can tell me if my specific location is supported or how to configure my equipment to use it. On one hand, that gives me hope that we're getting closer to near-universal ISP support. On the other hand, it's been like this for so long I question if it'll ever improve.
zokier 3y ago
Crusty enterprise networks are far bigger problem than retail ISPs. This is clearly visible by the fact that you have clear weekend peaks in e.g. Googles IPv6 adoption stats.

ranger_danger 3y ago

Maybe in 20 years my local ISP monopoly will start to roll out IPv6.

b112 3y ago
Mine rolled it out more than a decade ago, had nothing but problems, shrugged, and removed it. Sadly, I think they're more hesitant now.

throw0101d 3y ago

Two days ago: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205515

p1mrx 3y ago
Direct link to the list of IKEA products you can spell with an IPv6 address: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39209844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39209844

ipshii 3y ago

What! that's insane! if true

ramshanker 3y ago

I hope we see a not-so-subtle jump in usage on google ipv6 tracker. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html Anecdote, my ISP gives us IPv6 but not my employer. We use the IT equipment till the last breadth. I have seen, permanent table-fan running towards Floor's network hub. I guess that one is NOT IPv6 ready. :D

wongarsu 3y ago
I doubt it. Realistically the AWS charge mostly causes companies to stop giving IPv4 addresses to servers that never directly talk to customers. As a knock-on effect this will cause tooling to become more IPv6 aware, and put pressure on SaaS in infrastructure monitoring and dev tooling to be reachable via IPv6 (for example this might cause github to finally fix their IPv6 game because of higher customer demand). Maybe companies use the same opportunity to make sure their services also work via IPv6. But they won't stop offering their services on IPv4, and AWS changes don't put meaningful pressure on ISPs to roll out IPv6. If anything it will reduce the pressure on the price of IPv4 addresses, making it more viable for ISPs to hold out.
- zinekeller 3y ago
  > will cause tooling to become more IPv6 aware I doubt it, especially that there is an option of using private/CGNAT ranges instead of adopting a whole new protocol. Everyone who cares about IPv6 have already done their part, and people who don't care about it will likely use the lower-friction option, and between private IPv4 networks and IPv6 I bet that a lot of people will see private IPv4 as a lower-friction option.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    However the lowest friction option is to use private IPv4 between your servers, but give every server a public IPv6 it can use for outgoing calls: updating the OS, fetching github repositories, collecting logs on your favorite SaaS, etc. Of course you can do all this via IPv4 by setting up proxies or gateways, but that's more work and more moving pieces than checking the checkbox that you want a public IPv6 and having it just work ... provided everyone you want to talk to talks IPv6.

ceejayoz 3y ago

Maybe Amazon can start? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/load-balancer-ip-address-type.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/appl... > You can configure your Application Load Balancer so that clients can communicate with the load balancer using IPv4 addresses only, or using both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses (dualstack). I'd love to go IPv6 only. Amazon won't let me, and charges for the privilege. Look at the list of "no"s on https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ipv6-support.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ipv6-su....

vander_elst 3y ago
Last time I checked GitHub was also an offender.
troupe 3y ago
My guess is that going IPV6 only for load balancers would make it break for enough people that AWS thinks it would reflect poorly on their service.
- lolinder 3y ago
  That seems unlikely given that the vast majority of users have no clue what the underlying service provider is for the web services they're using, and those who do know are savvy enough to understand the difference between an AWS issue and a configuration issue.
  - troupe 3y ago
    Imagine if Cloudflare went to IPV6 only. Yes, Cloudflare's customers should know what that means, but the end users that are using the service may not be and if the error in anyway says Cloudflare, then it gives Cloudflare a bad reputation. While AWS is a bit (just a bit) more removed from the end user than Cloudflare, there is still the potential for it not being good PR.
    - 3y ago

dark-star 3y ago

Awesome move. It's about time! This might give IPv6 the final push it needs to convince the last few ISPs who are still stuck on IPv4-only

zanfr 3y ago
there is no clear benefit to most users tho
- mjhay 3y ago
  In the US, usually not - but the US is comparatively spoiled for IPv4 blocks. It's pretty common in a lot of places for ISP customers to share public-facing IPs. This causes all sorts of issues with people being unfairly spam blacklisted, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT
  - nfriedly 3y ago
    Even my (US) ISP defaults everyone to CGNAT.
- redserk 3y ago
  Households with multiple Nintendo Switch and I think the PS5 consoles (I may be mixing this up with Xbox) would significantly benefit. Some games assume there’s only one console per public IP, and expects ports NAT forwarded as such. Giving each end-user an IPv6 prefix completely solves that mess.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Up until the games start limiting things to a single IPv6 prefix, of course.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  It makes setting up a home server much easier, because you can get infinite free static IPs. That doesn't contradict that "most users" don't benefit, though.

xhkkffbf 3y ago

At what point do these numbers start to be like a crypto currency? But one with real utility?

bluGill 3y ago
They already are, but it is a risky investment - the higher the price goes the more people switch to IPv6 and thus the lower the value goes. Eventually there will be a tipping point where people realize they don't care about IPv4 and quickly the value will go to zero.
lightweb 3y ago
Check this out. IPV6 integrated with Bitcoin generated addressing. Every packet gets a unique address. Security implications are profound. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.15842.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.15842.pdf

mrweasel 3y ago

This could also slow down IPv6 adoption. This is going to free up a ton of IPv4 addresses, reducing the need for AWS to purchase new ranges. I know of a few companies that started auditing their public IPv4 usage on AWS after the original announcement. Some AWS customers have released 80+% of their public IPv4 addresses. The alternative isn't IPv6, it's private addresses. Many AWS customers have been slapping public IPs on EC2 instance just because they could or because they didn't know any better.

zamadatix 3y ago
Customers having to switch to private addressing still seems like more pressure than customers having infinite free public addresses was providing, not less. I.e. address exhaustion pressure isn't only about the complete inability to buy an IP it's about how much work you have to do to use IPv4 addresses.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  It depends on how you measure IPv6 adoption. Is it about your ability as consumer to use only IPv6, or your ability to offer a website reachable only via IPv6. AWS charging for IPv4 will help with the former, because companies now have more of a reason to care about IPv6. But it might delay the latter, because fewer IPs wasted on internal servers means less price pressure on useful IPv4 use by ISPs, giving those that still hold out less financial incentive to change anything.
  - kees99 3y ago
    IMHO, best way to measure IPv6 adoption would be - what percentage of your website's visitors are able to reach your IPv6-only site. That percentage should be well above 99% for a popular website operator to even consider going IPv6-only; needless to say, in most markets, this figure is way lower, with no clear path to improving.
    - eastbound 3y ago
      It doesn’t help that, if you enable IPv6 in Debian, the network becomes extremely slow for many things. The reason? If first tries to reach all domains with IPv6, times out, then use IPv4. Of course that’s because I didn’t successfully configure IPv6 with the network, but on the other hand, IPv4 only was successful at first try.

zanfr 3y ago

while I could set up v6 I just wont for a while... when I do I expect things to be better documented

wongarsu 3y ago
I've defaulted to setting up v6, but deactivating it once it causes trouble. I don't want to actively sink time into it, but in 95% it just works out of the box (or with obvious config changes, like adding an IPv6 listening port and an AAAA DNS entry), and in those cases I'm happy to let it stay until it causes trouble. In another 10 years it's probably worth putting more effort into the other cases as well, but so far I'm happy with getting 80% of the way there for 0.1% of the effort.
- wharvle 3y ago
  Yeah, IPv6 is shut off on my Google Fiber router. Stuff on the Internet breaks when it’s on (last tested three or so months back when they sent me a new router). When we first got Fiber, years ago, Amazon’s store was one of the things that broke until I turned off IPv6. Wouldn’t load at all, on any device on our network. Works fine for VPNs and such, but I don’t talk to the Internet with it, because my experience has been it’s terribly unreliable.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    I'm curious what breaks with IPv6 on. I've been running IPv6 dual stack for over a decade at home and pretty much never have any issues. I think I've run into a prefix change get bugged on my router's announcements that required a reboot, but that's like 2 times in the last 10+ years and I'm not 100% sure that was truly the issue. My phone is pretty much always has an IPv6 address and pretty much never has IP-related connectivity problems. I'm not using Google Fiber's router though, so that could be the complication.
    - wharvle 3y ago
      The typical behavior is that DNS returns an IPv6 address, then whatever-it-is sits there until a timeout, because it’s simply not being routed. I’ve not investigated further because turning off IPv6 fixes the problem and breaks nothing (that I care about). Anything that only returns an IPv4 address from DNS works either way. My cellular connection supports IPv6, but testing sites report it’s misconfigured in a bunch of ways. I don’t see problems in practice, though. But on my home network, it’s turned off.

j4yav 3y ago

They should donate the billion to projects that accelerate the transition.

b112 3y ago
Only when companies (who are for profit), and ISPs (who are for profit) buy new hardware, and config it for ipv6, will change come. Projects aren't the real problem.
- idatum 3y ago
  For my ISP, it's not just about the hardware, it's their provisioning software that needed replacing. It has to be simple for their support to understand how IPv6 is given to customers.
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  IPv6 has been around for 30 years and well supported by switching and routing vendors for 20. What hardware is out there today that does not support v6?
  - b112 3y ago
    Crappy hardware? My point is, software typically isn't the problem.

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nromiun 3y ago

If anyone wants to use GitHub from their IPv6 only VMs I would recommend a SSH reverse tunnel. It works like this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/116191/give-server-access-to-internet-via-client-connecting-by-ssh https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/116191/give-server-...

zokier 3y ago
You don't actually need ssh tunnel here though, you can just connect directly to the proxy server?
- nromiun 3y ago
  In this case the PC is the proxy, which sometimes does not have a public IP address (behind ISP NAT).
- p1mrx 3y ago
  Some sort of NAT64 is probably a better idea, because that applies below the TLS layer. When people complain about IPv6 and IPv4 being incompatible, the fact that you can establish a cross-protocol TCP+TLS session with just a NAT is a remarkable counterexample. It could've been a lot worse.
  - zokier 3y ago
    Sure, there never was a shortage of different ipv4/ipv6 transition/interop mechanisms. Problem has been that many of them haven't been all that great, and understanding the use-cases, compromises, and tradeoffs between the options can be very difficult, especially when vendors and operators like to tout their own tech. To this day I'm not sure what are the best options available now for different scenarios. 4rd/MAP-T/MAP-E/464XLAT/Dslite, nat64/siit/a+p, these things are enough to get your head spinning
    - p1mrx 3y ago
      "Reality has a surprising amount of detail"

yesimahuman 3y ago

Hoping this lights a fire under other AWS wrappers like Heroku and Vercel to support IPv6. Currently dealing with the fallout of the Supabase IPv6 change and frustrated that two of my core vendors still don't support it.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

>expected to bring $1B/year Yes. >and speed up IPv6 Fucking lol. It's still not enough of a financial hit for people to want to deal with IPv6. Should have just come up with a better protocol in the first place. That's what really would have stimulated adoption.

Borg3 3y ago
Something like this? http://borg.uu3.net/~borg/?ipv6 http://borg.uu3.net/~borg/?ipv6
- sgjohnson 3y ago
  > keep ARP, ND wasn't a great idea after all there's nothing wrong with ND and it addresses several security vulnerabilities, namely ARP cache poisoning. But the real reason why ARP was removed is because it's a layering violation. > NAT support (because it's everywhere these days) nothing at all is stopping you from doing NAT on IPv6, except for the fact that everyone hates NAT, even people that pretend that they like it. > Correct DHCP support (SLAAC wasn't a great idea after all) SLAAC is a great thing. Also, DHCPv6 also exists, which allows you to do exactly what DHCP lets you do. Android doesn't support DHCPv6, but that's not IPv6s fault. - IPv6->IPv4 interop (one way) There's no such thing as one-way communication if we're talking TCP. Besides, it's still fundamentally impossible if the other end has no idea what to do with the source address.
  - betaby 3y ago
    DHCPv6 doesn't support dhcpv6 forwarding though like dhcpv4 does. One can't forward dhcpv6 request over multiple ipv6 hops, only hop-by-hop forwarding supported to my knowledge.
  - Borg3 3y ago
    There are several IPv6 -> IPv4 interops (bridges) developed already. All of them appeard due to slow IPv6 adoption. Some of them are: NAT64, XLAT6, DS-Lite. Never heard about ND tables overflows? They fixed one thing, broken another. ARP poisoning is mostly fixed problem. I like NAT myself. Im dualhomed (el-cheapo), using policy routing and NAT. Everything works like a charm. I cant imagine such setup w/o NAT actually. SLAAC might be great thing for you, but not for others. This is why IPv6 is such a failure. Instead of creating simple protocol to meet middle ground, they slapped together annoying techs for specific cases like IoT. Great job.

nimbius 3y ago

imo the 'static' ip issue with ipv6 has not been solved by providers. cable internet cabals are content to use dhcpv6 to dole prefixes out, but these are the same providers whos DNS servers typically post four-digit latency figures for DNS queries so the idea they they are to be the ones to solve DHCPv4's scalability issues remains laughable. just try getting a statically assigned prefix from their "business" or "corporate" offerings. wont happen. SLAAC is the best hope so far, but regular hosted customers do not understand that slaac is calculated by mac, so theyll need education to ensure immutable architectures dont crash and burn on lift-and-shift redeployments. either that, or enjoy hardcoding ip's in your prefix to the boxes. then theres networking. most corporate network engineering that would handle ingress or peer traffic to clouds (especially azure tenants) treat ipv6 as a cursory knowledge...something theyre aware of in theory but have never taken it upon themselves to practice. i predict AWS will send a lot of them scrambling for mouldy ccna texts and taking down the hybrid cloud at least twice a month until the basics sink in. and finally, firewall and security devices. There are a lot of vendors that have gotten a free pass to grandstand about how stellar their IPv6 support is, only to send customers to phone tree purgatory trying to find support for a device that either cant route between local, unique local, special purpose ranges, ::1, or even the special discard ranges for things like DDoS protection. frankly its not an AWS issue (yet) but the only guise ive seen handle this competently are...cloudflare.

cdelsolar 3y ago

I still have no idea what IPv6 actually is or how it works, or how a router can be IPv4 or IPv6 only, etc.

p1mrx 3y ago
By what method did you learn what IPv4 is and how it works?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

szundi 3y ago

How nice they are to move the world forward, thanks

deleted 3y ago

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dpedu 3y ago

Could anybody recommend a book for learning IPv6? I know there are plenty out there, but what are the best, HN's recommendations? I get the general concepts and I use it on personal systems but I've spent too long just skirting by. It's time for a deep dive. I think the best type of book to learn from would have a mix of textbook knowledge and practical examples/demos.

unethical_ban 3y ago
The CCENT and CCNA certification books have chapters dedicated to IPv6 and I think they do a good job talking about it. edit: Some little tips about it. * The smallest subnet should be /64. Anyone making a smaller subnet than that is doing it wrong (looking at you, every ISP that assigns me an address) * Subnets should be created in four-bit chunks. You should always make /64, /60, /56, etc. for readability. That's because 4 bits make up one hex character in the address. * If you want to have private (non-internet-routable) IPv6 space, create a ULA. https://www.unique-local-ipv6.com/ https://www.unique-local-ipv6.com/ Imagine never having to worry about address overlap with VPNs or routing between two internal networks.
- infensus 3y ago
  This a thing which boggles my mind. Does this mean everyone gets /64 addresses to circumvent IP bans?
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    IPv6 banning would likely happen at that subnet level, not individually.
    - infensus 3y ago
      Ah right. But it will be a bit problematic, since the subnet size may vary between different ISPs, no?
      - 3y ago

exabrial 3y ago

What benefit does ipv6 bring to the every day user?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
matja 3y ago
What's an "every day user"? Maybe some P2P applications will magically start working or have lower startup time because of no need for STUN/TURN/ICE for NAT traversal.
aquaticsunset 3y ago
Their devices continue to work when a scarce resource is no longer plentiful. The every day user doesn't need to care, but the people working on the stuff the every day user has need to care.
patmorgan23 3y ago
IPv6 has marginally lower latency (in most cases) and lets peer-to-peer applications work flawlessly. If your ISP only has v4 CG-NAT then it gets you a lot better connectivity.
supertrope 3y ago
Any kind of application that acts as a server needs a direct IP connection. Gamers get errors about "strict NAT." Traditionally the solution to this problem caused by NAT was to forward the ports. If their ISPs has chosen CGNAT port forwarding is impossible. VoIP calls that have one way audio are a symptom of reachability issues caused by a firewall or address translation problems. VoIP services have adapted to IPv4 NAT by relying on proxying instead of STUN but CGNAT really degrades reliability. Smaller newer ISPs that can't obtain one IPv4 address per household are incurring significant CGNAT costs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624 Video chat uses the kludges of TURN when peer to peer connectivity does not work. This increases costs for the video chat service who in turn require a paid subscription as they will not relay traffic for free. BitTorrent and file transfer services need direct IP connectivity. If p2p file transfers worked on any network we would not need to mind Gmail's 25MB attachment limit, or pay for intermediary cloud storage.

jgalt212 3y ago

AWS fees are $3.6/mo. Not to defend AWS, but Verizon business wanted $20/mo for a static public IP address.

linux_devil 3y ago

Aws Kinesis and other services dont even support IPV6 to start with , how are they speeding up IPV6 adoption

krupan 3y ago

People, IPv6 was introduced 28 years ago! For some reason it is not catching on and probably never will. Let’s try something else. EDIT: my take on IPv6 is this. In the early 2000’s I wanted to run a web server at home. Figuring out how to make my $10 gateway/router do port forwarding was hard. IPv6 sounded like the right solution. Now… none of those problems really exist

jazzyjackson 3y ago
64 bits is too many bits. honestly could have slapped a country+area code in front and gained a few hundred IPv4 addresses per person.
- lajamerr 3y ago
  128 bits*
hcarvalhoalves 3y ago
> For some reason it is not catching on and probably never will. If a major player is making $1B out of it "not catching on", I agree it never will.
- krupan 3y ago
  So that started very recently in the history of IPv6, no? And if IPv6 is so awesome, how are they convincing people to pay for IPv4??
  - Dagger2 3y ago
    ...network effects? There are still people with legacy v4-only clients, which can never reach anything other than v4, or on v4-only ISPs. There are enough of them at the moment that we still need to support them. This isn't hard to figure out.

jsz0 3y ago

IPv6 has been such a wild ride. About 7 years ago there was a big IPv4 depletion scare when ARIN made it harder to obtain IPv4. I did a bunch of dual stack deployments for customers around this time. In subsequent years quite a few of them ended up paying us to come back in and un-deploy IPv6 as their network engineers or often 'the IT guy' neglected to maintain firewall rules and access-lists leading to major security issues. I can't really think of any other vital technology like this that has rotted on the vine and had so many false starts.

jrockway 3y ago

I am not sure if these incentives help IPv6 adoption. Nobody can turn off IPv4 today; there is always a long tail of people with broken IPv6 stacks. Since IPv4 continues to work, I'm not even sure it's worth setting up IPv6 so that someday you can switch IPv4 off; do work that gets you customers today, switch off of IPv4 when it becomes a crisis. I think the best incentive would be a high price on IPv4-only, but if you do the work to support dual-stack, then that fee is waived. That way, there is savings for doing the technical work today, and you pave the way for a brighter future. Personally, I think I'd pay the fee to not be dual stack these days. Everything in your infrastructure has to now check two things. Your website uptime checker has to probe via both IPv4 and IPv6. You have to maintain two sets of firewall rules. You have to remember to "ping -6 example.com" in addition to "ping example.com" when checking connectivity. I don't think it's worth the effort, and I say that as someone who first made their website available over IPv6 in like 2008. (I moved providers in 2020 and the new one didn't have IPv6. It made me sad. But now it's just one less thing to worry about.)

viraptor 3y ago
> Nobody can turn off IPv4 today ... for all services. There are internal servers talking to other servers which don't need ipv4. There's zerotier that gives you a private IPv6 network regardless of your network capabilities. The only part that actually still requires ipv4 is the general public user.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Sure, but internal servers talking to internal servers can also do so on private IPv4s, which are free. So, no need to bother with IPv6 and its myriad complexities just for that.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    Not always. Sometimes you talk between different providers, or to private endpoints on other services. Or its simpler use IPv6 between two networks rather than keep a global list of ipv4 ranges to make sure they don't collide.

CaffeinatedDev 3y ago

Amazon itself is a large user of AWS, is this taken into account when surmising the $1B/year figure?

beoberha 3y ago

I wonder how much of the IPv4 space is used for infra that could just be privately addressed with some reworking of network topology. I find these articles on HN focus much more heavily on consumer use of IPv4 for simple things like web browsing. But not a lot of consideration is paid to massive corporate systems and API surfaces. Would be interesting to know.

wmf 3y ago
I think this is what's really going to happen in AWS. People will audit their IP usage, discover that 90% doesn't need public addresses, and clean up their network. VPC more or less forces a combination of private addresses and NAT anyway and a clean VPC only needs a handful of public addresses. They don't need to deploy IPv6 and they're not going to.

josteink 3y ago

Sorry for being off-topic, but the utterly lacking IPv6 availability (still!) annoys me so much. I know IPv6. I can route it. I can setup networks with it. And my ISP supports it, but just kinda. For some arcane reason, it only supports it for some types of transport. Got Cable/Coax internet? Great! You get IPv6 and a subnet too! Got Fiber to the Home? You get IPv4. And no subnet. I'm in the latter segment, and I just don't get it. The ISP in question is Telia, a pretty big ISP in Scandinavia. If someone in the know-how could tell me at least why they're doing things like this, that might offer some mental consolation.

wmf 3y ago
Probably just broken equipment.

fennecbutt 3y ago

This is just more $ in Amazon pockets don't be proud of them for this at all.

webworker 3y ago
Yeah I'm not thrilled. This means I have to re-build some of my servers on Lightsail to pick a IPv6 only stack, it looks.

bsdpufferfish 3y ago

when a technology is so good, you have to force other people to use it

jiggawatts 3y ago

Meanwhile, Azure is gearing up to do the same thing. Except that their alternative to per-VM addresses is a NAT gateway that isn’t zone-redundant. Literally everything else is — including IP addresses and virtual networks — but not outbound Internet access. That’s going to just break and leave your entire network dead in the water if one of three zones has a hiccup. IPv6 can’t replace this garbage fast enough…