5 ms·

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 IPv

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.
    - jrochkind1 3y ago
      At any rate, the incentives or disincentives to use ipv6 on private networks are not affected by this AWS change?
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      Using IPv6 also comes along with many other complexities. If you already have a working IPv4 solution, working around costly public IPv4 addresses is likely much easier than trying to switch to IPv6 and having to adapt every part of your infrastructure to the many surprising ways it's different.
      - growse 3y ago
        Everyone's internal ipv4 setup "works" right up to the point you need to join to another internal network and have overlapping subnets. Or until you want you network segment to grow beyond a few thousand hosts. Or until.... It's always tradeoffs. The complexities of IPv6 (and in some cases, the simplicity) at least comes after learning about what they got wrong in v4.
        tsimionescu 3y ago
        The problem of having to re-IP your entire network doesn't go away in IPv6, it just happens in different circumstances. If you're using public IPs as recommended by the design, then if you ever switch ISP you need to re-IP your entire subnet, just as you would with overlapping private subnets in IPv4-world. Of course, the same would happen in IPv4, but it is almost unheard of to use public IPs for all machines in a private network there. There is very little extra simplicity in IPv6. The only thing it really does that most people fight with in any common place is to get rid of NAT, which is a fairly well understood technology by now. But getting rid of DHCP didn't work, peer-to-peer networks still get bogged down in firewalls even if they don't fight NAT, MTU problems are still around when running VPNs, etc. Maybe getting rid of ARP has helped in some scenarios for more complex networks? Instead, you have to deal with both DHCPv6 and SLAAC, with multiple IPs on every interface, with much harder to remember IPs, with always changing IPs, with the myriad IPv6/IPv4 conversion schemes, with larger DNS responses (requiring DNS over TCP more often), and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few things.
acdha 3y ago
> Nobody can turn off IPv4 today; there is always a long tail of people with broken IPv6 stacks. To the public internet, no. To internal services, possibly, and if you use a CDN you can have everything on the origin side using IPv6.

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.
  - jrochkind1 3y ago
    At any rate, the incentives or disincentives to use ipv6 on private networks are not affected by this AWS change?
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Using IPv6 also comes along with many other complexities. If you already have a working IPv4 solution, working around costly public IPv4 addresses is likely much easier than trying to switch to IPv6 and having to adapt every part of your infrastructure to the many surprising ways it's different.
    - growse 3y ago
      Everyone's internal ipv4 setup "works" right up to the point you need to join to another internal network and have overlapping subnets. Or until you want you network segment to grow beyond a few thousand hosts. Or until.... It's always tradeoffs. The complexities of IPv6 (and in some cases, the simplicity) at least comes after learning about what they got wrong in v4.
      - tsimionescu 3y ago
        The problem of having to re-IP your entire network doesn't go away in IPv6, it just happens in different circumstances. If you're using public IPs as recommended by the design, then if you ever switch ISP you need to re-IP your entire subnet, just as you would with overlapping private subnets in IPv4-world. Of course, the same would happen in IPv4, but it is almost unheard of to use public IPs for all machines in a private network there. There is very little extra simplicity in IPv6. The only thing it really does that most people fight with in any common place is to get rid of NAT, which is a fairly well understood technology by now. But getting rid of DHCP didn't work, peer-to-peer networks still get bogged down in firewalls even if they don't fight NAT, MTU problems are still around when running VPNs, etc. Maybe getting rid of ARP has helped in some scenarios for more complex networks? Instead, you have to deal with both DHCPv6 and SLAAC, with multiple IPs on every interface, with much harder to remember IPs, with always changing IPs, with the myriad IPv6/IPv4 conversion schemes, with larger DNS responses (requiring DNS over TCP more often), and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few things.

acdha 3y ago

> Nobody can turn off IPv4 today; there is always a long tail of people with broken IPv6 stacks. To the public internet, no. To internal services, possibly, and if you use a CDN you can have everything on the origin side using IPv6.