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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 com

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.
      - growse 3y ago
        Linux doesn't have a big "enable IPv6" switch, so it's not clear what you mean. The only way I can think of getting the behaviour you describe is if you configure the network to hand out v6 addresses and routes to hosts, and then just black hole the packets. What you have then is a broken network.
      - Dagger2 3y ago
        That's not how v6 works in Debian, or really anywhere. For one thing, you can't reach a domain with v6 if there's no AAAA record, so it certainly won't be trying to reach "all domains" with v6. If your network has broken v6 then yeah, that's gonna cause problems. That's not v6's fault, that's down to having a broken network.
  - patmorgan23 3y ago
    But this is also AWS exerting price pressure on its customers. This move is an increase in price pressure, not a decrease. If everything host on AWS becomes dual stack and gets first class IPv6 support after this move, that's a win for IPv6. The price for v4 address is going to bob up and down as more networks and content providers adopt v6 and are able to reduce their public v4 usage to just their edges. There will definitely be a long tail of v4, especially in the corporate world, but I think we'll get to 90-95% v6 capable within the next 5-10 year
sgjohnson 3y ago
AWS owns about 7% of the entire public IPv4 allocation space. There's no way this is going to slow down IPv6 adoption. Nobody likes NAT, especially when it comes to servers.
jerf 3y ago
"This is going to free up a ton of IPv4 addresses, reducing the need for AWS to purchase new ranges." Yup, this has been obvious for a while if you read the better economic analyses. Charging for IPv4 doesn't on its own remove it. It creates some sort of economic balance between the value and scarcity of the IPv4 address space. When you're trying to fit the entire world of 7 billion people into 4 billion addresses, the space looks pretty scarce. But assuming a roughly power law distribution of services and their importance of being on IPv4, as you cut off the people with lower-end needs, like, "my cell phone needs to communicate on the internet so let's give it an IPv4 address", you extremely rapidly cut through orders of magnitude of the old uses. That long tail of "Facebook is not willing to cut off even .01% of its user base so it has IPv4 addresses to serve on" may take a long time to get through, but we're well through getting huge swathes of the other users off of it. What kills IPv4 is in the far future when the expense of maintaining it specially exceeds the benefits. Since maintaining it is rather cheap, this is going to take a while. But as IPv4 diminishes in importance, ironically, so does the value of entirely eliminating it. When it is 1% of the traffic, who will really be desperate to drop that to zero?
- bluGill 3y ago
  Thing is if it is only 0.01% of users Facebook won't give up on they can just do a few ipv4 server/address. Now Facebook has severs around the world, but if it is only a few users they just need two servers - and that is only for redundancy. Now they have thousands (maybe even millions? I don't know) of servers and they may as well give all the external facing ones IPv4 addresses as most need that anyway and so the hassle of maintaining IPv6 only servers isn't worth it. And of course if you are in the 0.01% you will discover that while Facebook and google won't give up on you many other providers will as it just isn't worth the cost. By that time the cost won't be IPv4 addresses - they will be again free - it will be the cost of maintaining IPv4 on all the routers and servers. (the routers mean IPv4 will cost more, but it won't be for the address it will be for routing access)
- sva_ 3y ago
  > entire world of 7 billion people Should be more like 8bn now
nemothekid 3y ago
>The alternative isn't IPv6, it's private addresses. I really wish more AWS services or workflows worked with private addresses. Sometimes a service can be completely internal but needs a public address to either talk to Dynamo or install packages; but those endpoints aren't available via private IP, even though they physically live in the same region
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Why?
  - nemothekid 3y ago
    I really don't care about IPv6 or IPv4. In my neck of the woods, 10.0.0.0/8 is more than I would ever need. Most architectures I've seen only realistically need only a handful of public IPs, that then are assigned to a load balancer that does service discovery on internal services. I don't think about IP addresses at all.
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      Yeah but then you have to futz around with NAT.
      - nemothekid 3y ago
        Today you have to futz around with NAT, but you wouldn't have to if you simply never made any connections to the public internet. And for many services that's completely fine.
- coredog64 3y ago
  I believe the latest version of the VPC wizard defaults to gateway endpoints for both S3 and DynamoDB. If you’re in a 6-only VPC/subnet, an egress only gateway will allow you to grab packages from IPv6 enabled public data sources.
kccqzy 3y ago
Correct. I am convinced that the best way to speed up IPv6 adoption is to provide IPv6-only networking but with NAT64. Historical evidence is on this: cell phone ISPs have started doing this a long time ago and look at how high the IPv6 adoption is on mobile. Also, an IPv6-only network removes the happy eyeballs algorithm so any routing issues on the IPv6 internet won't be papered over by the speed of the IPv4 internet, so there's more incentive to fix that. (If you are interested in doing this at home, the most up-to-date documentation is a presentation from RIPE https://ripe87.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/8-IPv6-mostly_on_OpenWRT.pdf https://ripe87.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/8-I... that covers NAT64/DNS64/DHCP108/PREF64). Of course everything I said above is conditioned on speeding up IPv6 adoption as a goal. Unfortunately for many, IPv6 adoption is not a goal at all, so nothing I said above applies to them.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  Don't forget about MAP-T which does IPv4 NAT over IPv6. The client is IPv4, the ISP is IPv6, and server is IPv4. This is still CGNAT but IPv6 is provided. But means ISP uses IPv6 internally. The problem for NAT64 in general use is that there is lots of IPv4-only software. NAT64 is great for business networks where control the software, but home users are going to try to use their Xbox 360 or Windows game from the 90s.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

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.
    - growse 3y ago
      Linux doesn't have a big "enable IPv6" switch, so it's not clear what you mean. The only way I can think of getting the behaviour you describe is if you configure the network to hand out v6 addresses and routes to hosts, and then just black hole the packets. What you have then is a broken network.
    - Dagger2 3y ago
      That's not how v6 works in Debian, or really anywhere. For one thing, you can't reach a domain with v6 if there's no AAAA record, so it certainly won't be trying to reach "all domains" with v6. If your network has broken v6 then yeah, that's gonna cause problems. That's not v6's fault, that's down to having a broken network.
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  But this is also AWS exerting price pressure on its customers. This move is an increase in price pressure, not a decrease. If everything host on AWS becomes dual stack and gets first class IPv6 support after this move, that's a win for IPv6. The price for v4 address is going to bob up and down as more networks and content providers adopt v6 and are able to reduce their public v4 usage to just their edges. There will definitely be a long tail of v4, especially in the corporate world, but I think we'll get to 90-95% v6 capable within the next 5-10 year

sgjohnson 3y ago

AWS owns about 7% of the entire public IPv4 allocation space. There's no way this is going to slow down IPv6 adoption. Nobody likes NAT, especially when it comes to servers.

jerf 3y ago

"This is going to free up a ton of IPv4 addresses, reducing the need for AWS to purchase new ranges." Yup, this has been obvious for a while if you read the better economic analyses. Charging for IPv4 doesn't on its own remove it. It creates some sort of economic balance between the value and scarcity of the IPv4 address space. When you're trying to fit the entire world of 7 billion people into 4 billion addresses, the space looks pretty scarce. But assuming a roughly power law distribution of services and their importance of being on IPv4, as you cut off the people with lower-end needs, like, "my cell phone needs to communicate on the internet so let's give it an IPv4 address", you extremely rapidly cut through orders of magnitude of the old uses. That long tail of "Facebook is not willing to cut off even .01% of its user base so it has IPv4 addresses to serve on" may take a long time to get through, but we're well through getting huge swathes of the other users off of it. What kills IPv4 is in the far future when the expense of maintaining it specially exceeds the benefits. Since maintaining it is rather cheap, this is going to take a while. But as IPv4 diminishes in importance, ironically, so does the value of entirely eliminating it. When it is 1% of the traffic, who will really be desperate to drop that to zero?

bluGill 3y ago
Thing is if it is only 0.01% of users Facebook won't give up on they can just do a few ipv4 server/address. Now Facebook has severs around the world, but if it is only a few users they just need two servers - and that is only for redundancy. Now they have thousands (maybe even millions? I don't know) of servers and they may as well give all the external facing ones IPv4 addresses as most need that anyway and so the hassle of maintaining IPv6 only servers isn't worth it. And of course if you are in the 0.01% you will discover that while Facebook and google won't give up on you many other providers will as it just isn't worth the cost. By that time the cost won't be IPv4 addresses - they will be again free - it will be the cost of maintaining IPv4 on all the routers and servers. (the routers mean IPv4 will cost more, but it won't be for the address it will be for routing access)
sva_ 3y ago
> entire world of 7 billion people Should be more like 8bn now

nemothekid 3y ago

>The alternative isn't IPv6, it's private addresses. I really wish more AWS services or workflows worked with private addresses. Sometimes a service can be completely internal but needs a public address to either talk to Dynamo or install packages; but those endpoints aren't available via private IP, even though they physically live in the same region

paulddraper 3y ago
Why?
- nemothekid 3y ago
  I really don't care about IPv6 or IPv4. In my neck of the woods, 10.0.0.0/8 is more than I would ever need. Most architectures I've seen only realistically need only a handful of public IPs, that then are assigned to a load balancer that does service discovery on internal services. I don't think about IP addresses at all.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Yeah but then you have to futz around with NAT.
    - nemothekid 3y ago
      Today you have to futz around with NAT, but you wouldn't have to if you simply never made any connections to the public internet. And for many services that's completely fine.
coredog64 3y ago
I believe the latest version of the VPC wizard defaults to gateway endpoints for both S3 and DynamoDB. If you’re in a 6-only VPC/subnet, an egress only gateway will allow you to grab packages from IPv6 enabled public data sources.

kccqzy 3y ago

Correct. I am convinced that the best way to speed up IPv6 adoption is to provide IPv6-only networking but with NAT64. Historical evidence is on this: cell phone ISPs have started doing this a long time ago and look at how high the IPv6 adoption is on mobile. Also, an IPv6-only network removes the happy eyeballs algorithm so any routing issues on the IPv6 internet won't be papered over by the speed of the IPv4 internet, so there's more incentive to fix that. (If you are interested in doing this at home, the most up-to-date documentation is a presentation from RIPE https://ripe87.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/8-IPv6-mostly_on_OpenWRT.pdf https://ripe87.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/8-I... that covers NAT64/DNS64/DHCP108/PREF64). Of course everything I said above is conditioned on speeding up IPv6 adoption as a goal. Unfortunately for many, IPv6 adoption is not a goal at all, so nothing I said above applies to them.

ianburrell 3y ago
Don't forget about MAP-T which does IPv4 NAT over IPv6. The client is IPv4, the ISP is IPv6, and server is IPv4. This is still CGNAT but IPv6 is provided. But means ISP uses IPv6 internally. The problem for NAT64 in general use is that there is lots of IPv4-only software. NAT64 is great for business networks where control the software, but home users are going to try to use their Xbox 360 or Windows game from the 90s.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]