[HN Gopher] AWS Customers Cannot Escape IPv4
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       AWS Customers Cannot Escape IPv4
        
       Author : apparentorder
       Score  : 253 points
       Date   : 2023-09-22 07:15 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tty.neveragain.de)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tty.neveragain.de)
        
       | tormeh wrote:
       | It's not that people dislike IPv6 or like IPv4, it's that network
       | people are comfortable with IPv4 and all the extra tech
       | surrounding it. They know it works, so there's no technological
       | risk. There's nothing new to learn. It's cheap. There's nothing
       | your average business wants to do that can't be done on IPv4 that
       | can on IPv6. The ROI of just paying for IPv4 addresses and
       | associated tech/services is undeniable.
        
         | talent_deprived wrote:
         | > It's not that people dislike IPv6
         | 
         | Yes, for some who understand and have tested it, we do not like
         | or want IPv6, it has no privacy when the device's IP is public
         | on the Internet 24/7. No privacy extensions fix this. Test it,
         | it's not difficult, disable IPv6 in your home router, wait a
         | few hours, the kids will be complaining their search results
         | are messed up, that's just the start of the indication that the
         | advertisers now have a veil where with IPv6 they had clear
         | fully trackable results.
        
           | ianhawes wrote:
           | What's funny is IPv6 commonly triggers captcha on Google.
        
       | donor20 wrote:
       | IPv6 is such a massive headache it's kind of mind boggling. I
       | used to be super enthused - but it is absolutely less useful and
       | more annoying than it's worth.
        
         | 9dev wrote:
         | It's really not a headache in and of itself. The technology is
         | beautiful and enables lots of cool things - just look at all
         | the awesome stuff the fly.io team makes it do.
         | 
         | The headache are vendors that still refuse to properly
         | implement IPv6, in 2023.
        
         | jeroenhd wrote:
         | This is one example where it's clear IPv6 isn't the problem,
         | actually. A lot of problems with AWS would disappear if they
         | would just support IPv6 like your average budget ISP does.
         | 
         | IPv6 just works. Amazon, Github, and Azure don't. That's not
         | really a problem in most cases (very few people go IPv6 only
         | because it's just not necessary with CGNAT, and even then
         | network translation tricks can put up IPv6<->IPv4 bridges
         | easily). In Amazon's case, they don't even need to bother
         | setting up a real network, they could abuse an fd00::/8 network
         | to mimic their 10.0.0.0/8 network if they wanted to.
         | 
         | Amazon is terrible at implementing modern standards. Just look
         | at how long it took them to support DNSSEC on their domains,
         | and even that didn't exactly roll out great the first time.
        
           | Spivak wrote:
           | > IPv6 just works
           | 
           | Only via the herculean efforts of a bunch of people having to
           | literally reinvent the world to deal with it. Everything
           | needs IPv6 support specifically. It's such a mess, if IPv6
           | has just been identical to IPv4 but with larger addresses we
           | would be on it by now. But no they had to make it their
           | religious crusade to eliminate NAT (and now we have NAT66 so
           | clearly a winner) put IPSec in there which is hilarious in
           | the era of Wireguard and eliminate DHCP which is actually
           | insane and makes a stupid number of assumptions about hosts
           | being able to communicate with one another and actually
           | complicates DNS registration.
           | 
           | Can you imagine how trivial it would have been if you could
           | support both v4 and v6 by just supporting v6 and having
           | 0::v4addr be literally equivalent to ipv4? It would be more
           | difficult to _not_ support v6.
        
             | Dylan16807 wrote:
             | > Can you imagine how trivial it would have been if you
             | could support both v4 and v6 by just supporting v6 and
             | having 0::v4addr be literally equivalent to ipv4? It would
             | be more difficult to not support v6.
             | 
             | And how are you supposed to get the packets back when the
             | client has an address outside that range? You still need to
             | add support everywhere, or have NAT gateways into the areas
             | that lack support.
             | 
             | Automatic mapping of IPv4 addresses exists but it requires
             | support infrastructure just as much as any other method of
             | allowing access to IPv4 devices.
        
             | dilyevsky wrote:
             | Hey don't forget about NDP and weird ULA thing which is
             | kinda like private but global.
        
               | Spivak wrote:
               | Oh god how could I forget the "let's just replace ARP and
               | make people using LVS and keepalived change their
               | setups."
               | 
               | What you need to support dual stack? Who would do that...
        
             | SoftTalker wrote:
             | Yes I'm not qualified to really argue the point but naively
             | it never made sense to me that IPv4 was not backwards
             | compatible with IPv6 addressing. You'd think the people on
             | the committees would have foreseen the trouble that would
             | avoid. Telephone companies didn't make you dial the area
             | code for local numbers. Microsoft bent over backwards to
             | make sure that old DOS software still worked on Windows.
             | Linux has a mandate to never break userland. This is not an
             | unfamiliar concept.
        
               | p1mrx wrote:
               | IP is a bidirectional protocol, so the correct analogy
               | would be if Microsoft had to make DOS software run on
               | Windows, _and_ Windows software run on DOS.
               | 
               | Remember the error "This program cannot be run in DOS
               | mode"?
               | 
               | IPv4 and IPv6 are unidirectionally compatible using
               | NAT64. The fact that you can make an IPv6 to IPv4 TLS
               | connection using a packet-level translator without
               | breaking the endpoints is quite remarkable, and it
               | wouldn't have been possible if the protocols were too
               | dissimilar.
        
         | dopylitty wrote:
         | I've been listening to a very good IPv6 related podcast with
         | knowledgeable hosts (IPv6 Buzz) and all it's done is convince
         | me that IPv6 is a poorly thought out mistake.
         | 
         | Every other episode seems to be about a different new RFC
         | that's replacing another RFC because the original ended up
         | having a bunch of holes and edge cases. That's somewhat
         | understandable for a new protocol but the protocol have been
         | around for almost 30 years and is just so overly complex that
         | it's rife with these situations.
         | 
         | As an example the most recent such episode was on rfc6724[0]
         | which describes these convoluted algorithms systems are
         | supposed to follow to determine which of their many assigned
         | IPv6 addresses to use for a particular connection and also
         | which of many possible destination addresses to use. Just
         | reading the introduction makes your eyes water with how overly
         | complex and prone to nasty failure cases (what if the source
         | address isn't what you expect and somehow the connection routes
         | around your firewall?) the whole situation they've created is.
         | 
         | 0: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6724
        
           | noAnswer wrote:
           | This somehow reminds me of some anti EV (Electric Vehicle)
           | people. They accept ICEVs (Internal Combustion Engine
           | Vehicle) as given and normal (ICEVs just exist, the fuel
           | falls from the sky) but dig really deep into an anti EV
           | mindset. They follow anti EV blogs and podcasts. They will
           | tell you how bad EVs are for the environment, how mutch water
           | and cobalt and what not is used for the production without
           | acknowledging that the same is true for ICEVs.
           | 
           | I use IPv6 since 2006 and I just can't see how it can give
           | you "a massive headache". I read a blog post about how overly
           | complex HTTP/3 is. Better ignore it forever and never
           | implement it then. ;-) Also, which successful RFC protocol
           | doesn't have a see of follow-up RFCs?
        
       | mschuster91 wrote:
       | > RDS (nine in ten customers have public IP on RDS by accident)
       | 
       | AWS _does_ make it easy to fuck up with its default settings.
       | Subnets that auto-assign EIPs for every instance attached to them
       | _should not exist_ , period. And neither should RDS instances or
       | anything else be reachable from the public Internet by default.
        
       | wheybags wrote:
       | neveragain.de is... a strange choice of domain for a tech blog.
       | It sounds like a holocaust memorial site.
        
         | apparentorder wrote:
         | This domain is very, very old and at that time, the phrase
         | wasn't usually associated like it is today. Not sure what to do
         | about that.
        
       | NovemberWhiskey wrote:
       | > _almost no AWS API can be used from a VPC without public IPv4
       | addresses_
       | 
       | Virtually every single application at the company I work at
       | deploys into VPCs without public IPv4 addresses - this seems like
       | a ridiculous claim.
        
         | ericpauley wrote:
         | Do they use NAT gateways? These require public IPs.
        
           | NovemberWhiskey wrote:
           | No; we use AWS Direct Connect for access from our on-premise
           | networks.
        
       | Bluecobra wrote:
       | > There is no concept of private addresses in IPv6, which means
       | farewell to the Managed NAT Gateway and its magnificent pricing.
       | 
       | Maybe not in AWS, but there are Unique Local IPv6 addresses in
       | fc00::/7 and NAT66 if you really love NAT!
        
         | apparentorder wrote:
         | Yeah, I was referring to AWS; I should have made that clear.
         | ULA is frequently discouraged though, and NAT66, well ... just
         | no.
         | 
         | I just recently heard that MS apparently has built everything
         | IPv6 on Azure around NAT. This is so weird.
        
       | iopq wrote:
       | I migrate my proxy's IPv4 address from time to time to avoid
       | blocks
       | 
       | This is not so easy to do with a IPv6 address, AWS tends to want
       | to keep it the same
        
         | kaliszad wrote:
         | If you get a /48 you can probably evade the problem by
         | assigning a /64 for your proxy at a time. You will have another
         | ~65,500 such blocks for use. Yes, some might just block the /56
         | (you would still have another ~250 chances) or /48 but nothing
         | is perfect.
        
           | iopq wrote:
           | but how do I change the IPv6 address in AWS? I can just
           | assign a new Static IP for IPv4
        
             | xnyanta wrote:
             | Same thing for IPv6, but instead of assigning a new
             | singular IPv6, you assign a new subnet with millions of
             | IPv6 addresses.
        
       | mannyv wrote:
       | One major weirdness with ipv6 is that it occasionally works with
       | ipv4 and it's unclear why.
       | 
       | Example: we run a bunch of endpoints on ipv4, but get ipv6 IPs in
       | our logs. How? Are there 6-to-4 translators out there at ISP
       | edges?
       | 
       | Unknowns in networking are bad.
        
         | mschuster91 wrote:
         | > Example: we run a bunch of endpoints on ipv4, but get ipv6
         | IPs in our logs. How? Are there 6-to-4 translators out there at
         | ISP edges?
         | 
         | Proxies. Your logs are too trusting of X-Forwarded-For headers.
        
         | p1mrx wrote:
         | It's impossible for an IPv4 endpoint to accept an IPv6
         | connection. Perhaps you have a dual-stack CDN with an
         | unpublished IPv6 address that some users have found? Or your
         | service is accepting third-party 'Forwarded' headers, which
         | would allow HTTP clients to spoof their IP address.
        
       | alias_neo wrote:
       | Off topic: Does anyone know if this page is generated from a
       | Static-Site generator starting from Markdown?
       | 
       | I currently use Hugo and my blog is in Markdown in git, but the
       | theme is pretty heavy-weight, and I like this look of the page in
       | OP; Looking at the source, it's so minimal!
        
         | apparentorder wrote:
         | Yes, it's Markdown and I use https://jekyllrb.com with the
         | theme "jekyll-theme-hacker" to generate the site. I quite like
         | how simple it is.
        
           | alias_neo wrote:
           | Amazing, thank you!
        
       | digitalsushi wrote:
       | My ISP, Fidium, does not have the word IPv6 on its entire
       | website. And definitely has no support of it on my WAN. They
       | should. I want to connect to IPv6 services using their
       | connection.
       | 
       | I actually keep a cheap Comcast connection as a second WAN just
       | to get IPv6 enabled on my home network. (And also because I live
       | in the woods in New Hampshire and having two ISPs means I have
       | fairly ok uptime)
        
       | mkl95 wrote:
       | > The first pattern is having multiple Load Balancers (per VPC);
       | this is often the result of using several readily available
       | Cloudformation templates / Terraform modules, or somehow using
       | Kubernetes ingress controllers that create a Load Balancer for
       | every service. This is fixed by not doing that! A single Load
       | Balancer can handle many URLs and services.
       | 
       | This is the definition of cloud bloat. The fact there are tons of
       | systems abusing that kind of architecture probably justifies
       | charging for IPv4.
        
         | Spivak wrote:
         | I think it's an impedance mismatch between the feature people
         | want -- "logical load balancers" and the feature they're
         | offered "physical load balancers."
         | 
         | How nice it would be if you could just create a bunch of load
         | balancers and all that actually meant was that it was just
         | adding config profiles to a single physical load balancer and
         | kept them truly isolated? Right now it's really annoying
         | because load balancer config is global state and everyone has
         | to either be kind neighbors when adding themselves to it or
         | manage them top-down.
        
         | doublet00th wrote:
         | I do believe the AWS Load Balancer Controller on Kubernetes
         | allows for sharing a single "physical" load balancer.
         | 
         | You have to set a load-balancer-name annotation
         | https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/aws-load-balancer-controll...
         | to tie everything together to one load balancer. There is a
         | downside where you have to have a few other annotations be the
         | same value across your ingresses, but once you work around
         | that, you're good to go.
        
           | renewiltord wrote:
           | I couldn't find it easily specified in docs. This is a common
           | use-case and part of why I avoid EKS for HTTP workloads is
           | that I have tiny services I want to just make available and I
           | don't want to have another full ELB sitting there. It isn't a
           | cost thing primarily. It's that now I have another
           | significant resource. I want all of these things on a misc
           | LB.
        
       | supriyo-biswas wrote:
       | IMO services like Lambda and S3 not supporting IPv6 is the real
       | issue, and AWS shouldn't have made the pricing change without
       | first making them dual-stacked, accessible over IPv6.
       | 
       | (Technically S3 does have a separate dual stack endpoint, however
       | it doesn't really help as I have to change application
       | configuration anyway to deal with this change.)
        
       | josephcsible wrote:
       | I feel like there's now a perverse incentive here for Amazon to
       | drag their feet at implementing full feature parity with IPv6. I
       | wish these new charges only applied for IPv4 addresses used with
       | services that already do have that.
        
       | tormeh wrote:
       | Is there a cloud provider that is IPv6-first? Or do they all have
       | the same problems?
        
       | michaelteter wrote:
       | Sorry for the aside, but I hope the neveragain.de author will
       | make a blog post about their site theme. I _really_ like it, and
       | of course I would like to mostly copy it for my own personal
       | site.
       | 
       | That said, until the cost of IPv4 becomes really huge, few
       | organizations are going to suffer the effort-cost of embracing
       | IPv6.
       | 
       | I would argue that the IPv6 sales story is
       | unmemorable|unclear|weak. Also, it is arguable that most IPv4
       | addresses are wasted.
        
         | chandlerswift wrote:
         | Looks like the theme might be a lightly modified version of the
         | GitHub Pages Hacker theme[0]?
         | 
         | [0]: https://github.com/pages-themes/hacker
        
           | apparentorder wrote:
           | It's a Jekyll theme,
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37609543
        
       | kennu wrote:
       | Worst for me is CloudFront not supporting IPv6 for custom
       | origins. If you happen to run a lot of separate Fargate
       | containers as origins, you have to enable public IPv4 addresses
       | for them, and that will soon double the price of small
       | confainers. Amazon needs to make their infrastructure actually
       | support IPv6 before starting to charge extra for legacy IPv4
       | usage.
        
         | paraxial_0 wrote:
         | Yeah, somehow this one hurts the most. I know Amazon has built
         | a giant beast here and rolling out IPv6 across all of their
         | million services is a huge undertaking, but I can't see any
         | reason for CloudFront not supporting IPv6 origins, like
         | yesterday. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard
         | relatively speaking, and would provide a good tool for working
         | around other limitations. Honestly I've always felt that
         | Amazon's decision-making ultimately had the best interests of
         | their customers in mind, until now. I think this is a bad sign
         | for things to come.
        
       | dopylitty wrote:
       | As an AWS customer I want to escape IP entirely. It's a waste of
       | time managing these complex networking systems with their archaic
       | protocols (IP, BGP, DNS, etc)
       | 
       | Just let me strongly associate identities with my workloads and
       | apply policy indicating which workloads should be able to send
       | data with which other workloads.
       | 
       | How data gets from one workload to another should not even be my
       | concern, just make it happen.
        
         | paulddraper wrote:
         | Uh, you want the Internet without Internet Protocol?
        
         | pragma_x wrote:
         | I agree completely. FWIW, this sentiment is why we're seeing a
         | lot of cloud "platforms" crop up that do exactly what you're
         | talking about. Rather than get mired in the component-zoo of
         | virtualized datacenter (read: pretend) networking, just
         | abstract all of it away.
        
         | drpossum wrote:
         | While your sentiment is valid, this is the type of argument
         | people make on low code solutions. Which has never worked in
         | reality and never will. There's just too much nuance and detail
         | that needs to be considered when you have to do and optimize
         | real workloads.
        
           | Spivak wrote:
           | Of course but it pushes the abstraction forward to what we
           | really want. It turns out that most applications don't
           | actually want to mess with IP except as an implementation
           | detail and optimization. Which is why most of the time you
           | don't and you just get some application layer HTTP payload,
           | RPC thing or WSGIish type call on the incoming side and let
           | the ops people deal with the networking bits and it works
           | well enough that people mostly don't complain. The request is
           | that more outgoing services adopt this model where you had it
           | off to your application server and it does the work and just
           | gives you the data you want back.
           | 
           | I don't think it's that crazy, it's just formally
           | standardizing where we're already going.
        
         | hughw wrote:
         | Like Heroku? (disclaimer, haven't used Heroku in years, no idea
         | what the state of it is now).
        
         | flerchin wrote:
         | IME "big picture folks" suddenly care about the details when
         | their big picture fails to solve for the details.
        
       | solatic wrote:
       | Half the reason AWS has leading IPv6 support in the first place
       | is due to mandates from the US government to start migrating.
       | Author is correct that, from a cost perspective, the new costs
       | are immaterial to large customers, but I wouldn't discount the
       | power of policy mandates from the largest customers, where the
       | threat of building an in-house alternative to comply with policy
       | might be sufficient to force AWS to finally prioritize support.
        
         | apparentorder wrote:
         | Indeed. I really don't like the thought, but I more and more
         | believe that there is no other way to incentivize IPv6 at the
         | "server side". The client (end user) side seems to do well,
         | considering that Google reports IPv6 end user traffic of almost
         | 50% these days.
        
           | biohax2015 wrote:
           | > The client (end user) side seems to do well, considering
           | that Google reports IPv6 end user traffic of almost 50% these
           | days.
           | 
           | That's because all mobile data connections are on IPv6
        
       | pnpnp wrote:
       | AWS has a way to go with their IPV6 services, but IPV6-only is
       | very doable right now in EC2.
       | 
       | I have a WireGuard server that was dual-stack. I turned off IPV4
       | to see what would happen, and it kept chugging along very nicely.
        
         | mike_d wrote:
         | ...if you are running one service and not really using AWS in
         | any meaningful way other than as a VPS provider.
        
           | pnpnp wrote:
           | You're not wrong, that's why I prefaced it saying their
           | services are lacking. I was just pleasantly surprised that
           | EC2 supports it.
        
       | ruiseal wrote:
       | The "cannot escape IPv4" is apt because while you can setup an
       | IPv6 only VPC so many things break; from various AWS services to
       | package repositories [0]. So then you're stuck either enabling
       | IPv4 or running a NAT64 gateway (or trusting someone to run one
       | for you [1]).
       | 
       | [0] https://blog.devopstom.com/ipv6-only-ec2/ [1]
       | https://nat64.net and http://v4-frontend.netiter.com
        
       | hkt wrote:
       | There needs to be a body of law relating to technical matters
       | like this (and interoperability etc) that is adjacent to
       | competition law. Some things we just need everyone to be on the
       | same page about. It is manifestly the case that ipv6 is never
       | going to be that, because the incentives to invest simply don't
       | exist for companies like AWS.
       | 
       | This distorts the market in eyeball networks and hosting - the
       | former are under little pressure to offer v6, and new entrants to
       | the latter can _only_ offer v6. Competition law in the EU works
       | (I think?) on the principles of consumer benefit and market
       | fairness. On that basis, I 'm left wondering why this has never
       | been pursued by the EU's competition authorities.
        
         | robertlagrant wrote:
         | Lots of AWS customers want IPv4 because that's what they know,
         | and that's what they benefit from.
         | 
         | To me, the question is: what stops me today from spinning up an
         | IPv6-only website and having 99% of the world's browsers use
         | it? If the answer is "nothing", then AWS shouldn't be forced to
         | offer IPv6 (or only IPv6) - IPv4 is just part of what they
         | offer customers. If the answer is "these 7 things" then those 7
         | things need to be fixed[0] before we pay civil servants to try
         | and force companies to do things that they barely understand.
         | 
         | [0] E.g. in the UK, it's some of the big ISPs that don't do
         | IPv6, so there's no point forcing someone way upstream (and way
         | more optional) in the process to do something
         | https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/11/update-on-ipv6...
        
         | jeroenhd wrote:
         | The EU did have a mandate for government services to use IPv6,
         | but the programme it was part of got replaced by another that
         | didn't include IPv6.
         | 
         | The European Commission did advocate for IPv6 use, but, the EU
         | being the EU, motivated their recommendation by complaining
         | that law enforcement had issues tracking down people behind
         | CGNAT, and made clear that they wanted every IP address to
         | point to a specific person for law enforcement reasons.
         | 
         | So, yeah, I don't think we should let the EU deal with the
         | specifics of network infrastructure just yet.
         | 
         | I think it's hard to make an economic argument for IPv6. Yes,
         | it's obviously a superior technology, but ISPs can CGNAT for
         | cheap, consumers can still access every server, and the EUR40
         | per year a business needs to pay for an IPv4 address isn't
         | exactly breaking the bank either.
         | 
         | Perhaps the EU should force the issue, but I think countries
         | like Lithuania ,where there is practically no IPv6 available
         | (0.58%, according to https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6-zoom,
         | but who knows how accurate that is), will protest any mandate
         | that will force their ISPs to buy new networking equipment.
        
           | betaby wrote:
           | > ISPs can CGNAT for cheap
           | 
           | Not really that cheap. While CPAEX is CAPEX, OPEX is still a
           | thing and operating CGNAT requires efforts. Also some (most?)
           | CGNAT implementations are buggy and is not a good user
           | experience, even for users who don't understand the concept
           | of IP at all.
        
             | jeroenhd wrote:
             | > Also some (most?) CGNAT implementations are buggy and is
             | not a good user experience, even for users who don't
             | understand the concept of IP at all.
             | 
             | They're a pain, especially when you're visiting a website
             | with CAPTCHAs, but the money they save on buying IP space
             | seems to be worth the bad experience from an ISP point of
             | view.
             | 
             | Even here in the Netherlands, with its relatively high
             | wages, a fiber ISP decided to use CGNAT on their new fiber
             | networks as a cost-cutting measure. Luckily, customers can
             | disable CGNAT in their online control panel, but the cost
             | cutting measure seems to be worth the annoyed customers
             | from that company's perspective at least. Of course they
             | also didn't roll out IPv6.
        
           | mschuster91 wrote:
           | > ISPs can CGNAT for cheap
           | 
           | The problem is customers don't like CGNAT. You can't run
           | Animal Crossing on Nintendo Switch in network mode as a host
           | if you don't place the Switch as a catch-all in the DMZ.
           | 
           | Wish I were joking here - especially due to the security risk
           | involved in running something in all-ports-open on the
           | Internet - but Nintendo doesn't seem to (want to) run
           | STUN/TURN servers.
        
           | pantalaimon wrote:
           | Is there any networking equipment that was sold in the last
           | 10 years that does not support IPv6?
        
             | jeroenhd wrote:
             | I don't have a complete overview of the industry, but there
             | were at least one or two Ubiquity gateways that didn't
             | support hardware accelerated IPv6 routing. I also read
             | about a lineup of Microtik switches that got updates to
             | enable IPv6 hardware offloading this year.
             | 
             | Perhaps the enterprise side of networking is better about
             | this stuff, but I doubt it if my experiences with other
             | enterprise products is anything to go by.
             | 
             | The packets routed by these devices will end up at their
             | destination, but at very low speeds.
        
       | Hikikomori wrote:
       | There's one viable solution to be able to run IPv6 only subnets
       | in AWS, their (or your own) NAT gateways support v6->v4 NAT. So
       | it allows you to create large IPv6 only subnets for your compute
       | services (ec2, ecs, k8s, elb, all supports that), allowing your
       | containers to scale without worrying about IP addresses. Then you
       | use dual stack subnets for other AWS services that may not
       | support IPv6 and your compute services can access them through
       | the NAT gateway.
        
         | apparentorder wrote:
         | ECS, ELB and most other services do not support IPv6-only
         | subnets, as mentioned in the article.
         | 
         | ECS does support dual-stack IPv6, but most other services do
         | not support IPv6 at all.
        
       | mjevans wrote:
       | It would really help if there were real ISP competition in the
       | USA. There's only one actually broadband ISP provider where I
       | rent, which is in the suburbs near Seattle. It's NOT a rural area
       | by any definition, and yet Comcast is my only option. Their price
       | and service reflect that reality...
        
         | chungy wrote:
         | > yet Comcast is my only option.
         | 
         | Thank endless lobbying that make legally mandated monopolies a
         | thing in this arena. They did it with phone companies too.
         | 
         | It's not "just Comcast" by happenstance. It's "just Comcast" by
         | legal regulation.
        
           | paulddraper wrote:
           | AFAIK, most areas in the U.S. have wireless ISPs available.
        
         | mike_d wrote:
         | IPv6 adoption is only going to further the consolidation of
         | customers onto the big monopoly providers. They will be the
         | only ones who can afford to add the dedicated network
         | engineering staff to make it work reliably.
         | 
         | Most people don't realize there are two IPv6 internets right
         | now, the Cogent side and the Hurricane Electric side. Both are
         | equally sized and refuse to connect to each other, so you need
         | to know that and either buy transit from both or buy transit
         | from a network that buys from both. At least one major provider
         | I know of is still running v6 over tunnels. In many places your
         | v6 traffic is taking suboptimal routes, whereas an enterprise
         | network may have v4 connectivity at each datacenter, v6 all
         | gets sent to that one box under Dave's desk.
         | 
         | But we continue to measure v6 adoption at places like Google
         | and Cloudflare where dedicated teams make sure packets arrive
         | and pat ourselves on the back.
        
           | greyface- wrote:
           | > two IPv6 internets right now, the Cogent side and the
           | Hurricane Electric side
           | 
           | Cogent engages in peering spats on IPv4 too; this dynamic is
           | not new with or unique to IPv6, or limited to Cogent/HE. The
           | lesson here is to not go singlehomed under Cogent, not to
           | reject IPv6.
        
             | mike_d wrote:
             | The takeaway here was that you need to be aware of it to
             | make IPv6 work. Again, your average operator of a small
             | regional WISP may try to deploy v6 because they lack v4
             | space and face customer complaints because they single home
             | behind HE and can't reach the other half of the internet.
             | 
             | Currently v6 is like connecting to the late 90s internet.
             | It dosen't work as well as people think.
        
         | luhn wrote:
         | Consumers don't know or care about IPv6, so competition won't
         | incentivize ISPs to implement it.
         | 
         | Funny that you complain about Comcast, when I was with Comcast
         | I actually had native IPv6. With my current provider I only
         | have IPv6 through NAT46.
        
         | huijzer wrote:
         | > Comcast is my only option
         | 
         | Maybe Starlink is another option. It has some drawbacks like
         | reduced performance during heavy rain, but I've seen some
         | positive reviews as well.
        
           | ninkendo wrote:
           | Starlink doesn't have capacity for a large urban area.
           | There's only so many satellites available per square mile,
           | and if you have a sizable fraction of a major city using
           | starlink, they'd all be bottlenecked on a handful of
           | satellites at best, even with the huge number of satellites.
           | Starlink only makes sense for low-geographic-density
           | deployments, where the number of customers on the same
           | satellite is (relatively) low.
        
         | gnopgnip wrote:
         | Comcast supports ipv6 though, in 2016 they hit 98% ipv6
         | support.
        
           | 1ncorrect wrote:
           | And Comcast were the biggest proponents of building IPv6
           | support into the DOCSIS specs, because they exhausted 10/8 in
           | the management network for their modem fleet.
        
       | fulafel wrote:
       | It seems obviously against AWS incentives to offer working v6 -
       | all their influencing tools ("well architected" criteria,
       | certificates) strongly herd you towards building mazes of
       | ambigously addressed 10.x RFC1918 networks, and not internet
       | style architectures with end-to-end addressing.
       | 
       | In the world of their recommendations, even the concept of a
       | "public ip address" is a red flag, and AWS even recommends (for
       | an added cost of course) tooling to flag and "mitigate" them.
       | These provide a strong lock-in effect when customers spend effort
       | to build the complex infrastructure for them in the name of
       | security, even though in reality they hurt security through
       | unnecessary complexity, addressing ambiguity, etc.
        
         | jiggawatts wrote:
         | Azure is copying this wholesale.
         | 
         | I've lost track of all of the "Private Endpoints", "Private
         | Links", "Service Endpoints", "Private Resolvers" and "Virtual
         | WAN" products they've introduced... all to make IPv4 work at
         | scale.
         | 
         | Literally none of those products would be required if they had
         | just made IPv6 work properly.
         | 
         | Instead, they NAT IPv6, so you can't even use it to avoid the
         | NAT forced upon you by IPv4. They also release _new_ products
         | -- in 2023 -- that don 't support IPv6 and likely never will.
         | 
         | There is _still_ an entire page[1] of listed limitations in the
         | docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-
         | network/ip-s...
         | 
         | Think about how insane it would be if this was the IPX -> IPv4
         | transition. Imagine if this page said "IPv4 limitations: All
         | VMs must include at least one IPX address, etc..."
         | 
         | Sounds nuts, right? I was migrating customers to IPv4 from IPX
         | in 1999, and IPv6 support materialised in about the 2001-2003
         | timeframe. It's been _decades_ , but it still feels like 1999
         | and migrating Novell NetWare where we had to have IPX+IPv4
         | because "not everything supports IPv4 yet".
         | 
         | [1] This is definitely not all of the limitations. Most of
         | their PaaS products don't support IPv6. Hence, any IaaS+PaaS
         | solutions must use (mostly) IPv4.
        
           | pantalaimon wrote:
           | It's almost as if those big cloud providers want to prevent a
           | transition to IPv6 as relying on IPv4 will solidify their
           | oligopoly.
           | 
           | Any new competitor would have to cough up a huge upfront cost
           | for IPv4 addresses, if they could even get them at that
           | scale.
        
           | benterix wrote:
           | Wait a second. A private link means that a service endpoint
           | is public so a part of your traffic goes through the
           | Internet, which is supposed to be insecure (even if you have
           | encryption in transit?), so you don't want to do that and
           | they will happily route your traffic internally so it is not
           | exposed to the bad Internet - for a fee. All these VPC
           | Endpoints etc. cost money and you are charged by the our. I
           | don't think IPv6 would change anything here, they would find
           | a way to charge customers for "security" anyway.
        
             | jiggawatts wrote:
             | That's what I thought at first, but that's not quite right.
             | 
             | Service Endpoint: Allows a PaaS service (that itself uses
             | public addresses) have firewall rules for overlapping
             | private vnet addresses. E.g.: You can have have two VMs
             | both on 10.0.0.123 addresses (in separate VNets) using
             | individual "Allow" rules to the target service. Essentially
             | Azure tags the traffic at the VXLAN level with the source
             | network ID on top of the IP address, making it a "fat IP
             | address" that is unique within Azure and can be used in
             | firewall rules.
             | 
             | Private Endpoint: Makes a PaaS service appear on a private
             | network address range instead of the default public range.
             | This allows your _on-prem_ firewalls to isolate your
             | specific PaaS instance from other customers -- otherwise
             | the traffic gets  "blended in" with everyone else in the
             | same public service tag ranges. This also allows you to use
             | your ExpressRoute fibre links to route traffic from on-prem
             | to the public service.
             | 
             | In all scenarios, the traffic goes over Azure networks
             | and/or Microsoft's private backbone. You have to go out of
             | your way to route traffic "via the Internet". Remember:
             | Network addresses are just numbers! Routing rules determine
             | how they flow, and public addresses _can_ be used on
             | private networks.
             | 
             | Fundamentally, all this exists just to _enable_ the ability
             | to firewall things. With overlapping IPv4 addresses and
             | small shared blocks of IPv4 addresses with NAT behind them,
             | it would be impossible otherwise.
             | 
             | With IPv6, using firewalls would be much simpler because
             | overlapping addresses aren't needed any more. Similarly,
             | PaaS services could trivially allocate IPv6 addresses _per
             | customer instance_ , so that customers could apply
             | selective firewall rules.
        
               | eddythompson80 wrote:
               | What a shit show. Seriously I can never rant enough about
               | how awful Azure networking and their bullshit concepts
               | is. Like they don't know how to do networking, so they're
               | gonna introduce a bunch of shit and pretend that
               | nonesense makes perfect sense because of their own
               | ineptitude.
        
               | jiggawatts wrote:
               | Most of the complexity is a side-effect of having to do
               | IPv4 far past the scale where the ~17 million private
               | addresses might be sufficient.
        
               | WorldMaker wrote:
               | Some of the complexity seems to be the security theater
               | of the lowest common denominator of customer demands.
               | Companies invest too much money into incredibly expensive
               | Palo Alto firewalls then demand Azure route through those
               | too so that their cloud operations are as theatrically
               | "secure" as their main network because look at all those
               | amazing sunk costs invested in it.
        
               | rewmie wrote:
               | > In all scenarios, the traffic goes over Azure networks
               | and/or Microsoft's private backbone.
               | 
               | That's the whole selling point of private links. How
               | could you possibly missed that? That's exactly why
               | companies onboard onto the service. They say exactly this
               | exactly on the marketing brochure. That's why customers
               | line up to pay for it: to get their traffic flow only
               | through private networks instead of through the wild.
               | 
               | What kind of confusion reigns in your mind to come to the
               | conclusion this was some obscure conspiratorial gotcha?
               | 
               | It boggles the mind how you felt the need to come up with
               | absurd conspiracies involving IPv4 to arrive at a claim
               | that the marketing pamphlets show front and center as
               | their whole reason of existence: avoid traffic to go
               | through the internet, and instead pay extra to go through
               | private pipes they own.
               | 
               | It's as if the name actually means something!
        
               | d-z-m wrote:
               | > That's why customers line up to pay for it: to get
               | their traffic flow only through private networks instead
               | of through the wild.
               | 
               | I believe their point is that it doesn't flow through
               | "the wild" in any case, it is probably routing within the
               | Azure AS(aka Microsoft controlled networks). However, as
               | you say, people line up to pay for it, likely for reasons
               | having to do with their architecture/security
               | model/compliance requirements.
        
               | d-z-m wrote:
               | > In all scenarios, the traffic goes over Azure networks
               | and/or Microsoft's private backbone. You have to go out
               | of your way to route traffic "via the Internet".
               | Remember: Network addresses are just numbers! Routing
               | rules determine how they flow, and public addresses can
               | be used on private networks.
               | 
               | My understanding is that if you don't have a private
               | endpoint, your traffic to an Azure cloud service won't be
               | routed out to the "big bad internet" per-say, but it will
               | be routed within the Azure AS as mere IP traffic.
               | 
               | If you have a private endpoint to an Azure service in
               | your virtual network, that means Azure has provisioned
               | you a virtual NIC with some private IP address, and
               | presumably alters DNS resolution within your network for
               | that Azure service to resolve to the IP address of the
               | NIC. The NIC provides (presumably encrypted) link layer
               | transport out to the Azure service.
               | 
               | Compliance for some customers may dictate that there
               | aren't any routes out to the public IP address space from
               | within a network. If you still need access to cloud
               | services, private endpoints are a necessity.
               | 
               | All that to say, I think Private Endpoints provide more
               | than just a means of firewalling traffic/changing the IP
               | address associated with a service; the actual transport
               | from client->cloud service is fundamentally different.
        
               | beoberha wrote:
               | You're exactly right that the main point of private
               | endpoints is to allow customers who aren't allowed to
               | open firewalls to public internet to still connect to
               | their public services like Azure Storage, Key Vault, or
               | SQL
        
           | devoutsalsa wrote:
           | If you're not using token ring, it's not a real network.
        
             | anyoneamous wrote:
             | I read that as "Tolkien ring" - which would also be
             | appropriate, since "...and in the darkness bind them" is a
             | good summary of cloud vendor lock-in.
        
           | thaumasiotes wrote:
           | Comcast at some point stopped letting you administrate your
           | own router. You can log in to it, but port forwarding is no
           | longer available through the administration interface.
           | 
           | If you want port forwarding, they recommend that you do...
           | something. It's not clear what; what you can find on the
           | internet is mostly just people complaining that they insisted
           | to customer support that they needed port forwarding,
           | customer support said they'd do that, and port forwarding
           | still doesn't work.
           | 
           | But, intriguingly, it turns out that a Comcast router will
           | also assign every device on your network at least one public
           | ipv6 address. They also firewall all incoming ipv6 traffic,
           | but unlike the situation with port forwarding, you can
           | disable that firewall on the router admin page. (You can't
           | put up your own firewall.)
        
             | BobbyTables2 wrote:
             | [dead]
        
             | supertrope wrote:
             | One cannot unplug the Comcast issued router, power cycle
             | the modem, and plug in a customer owned router?
        
               | StuffMaster wrote:
               | All I see are combo units these days.
        
               | spookthesunset wrote:
               | All the modems I see support bridge mode. When enabled
               | the Comcast device doesn't do any of the routing at all.
               | Your own device gets to do that instead.
        
               | iudqnolq wrote:
               | You have to bring your own modem. Then you bring your own
               | combo unit or bring your own modem that you can plug a
               | router into.
        
             | lloeki wrote:
             | > port forwarding is no longer available through the
             | administration interface.
             | 
             | Sounds like the CGNAT experience, possibly blanket applied
             | even if you have a globally routable public IPv4 in order
             | to have consistent behaviour and reduce network management
             | / support case complexity.
        
           | icedchai wrote:
           | A lot of IT folks are still fearful of IPv6. I've been on
           | calls where people disable IPv6 as a matter of "best
           | practice." It's sad. People will gladly learn the latest
           | flavor of the month web framework but won't take time to gain
           | experience with a fundamental protocol.
        
             | Varriount wrote:
             | Why? What's the (supposed) fear?
        
               | LinuxBender wrote:
               | _Why? What 's the (supposed) fear?_
               | 
               | Disclaimer: I have never worked for Amazon but I can add
               | some input from the assorted medium to large companies I
               | have been employed with. I won't mention any names. _This
               | is for someone I know reads my comments wink wink_
               | 
               | I am not justifying it, just adding some of the bits I
               | experienced. There are many security devices that do not
               | have the same capabilities on IPv6 as IPv4 yet. Some
               | enterprise IoT devices only support IPv4. Adding to this
               | some network engineers don't want to step outside of
               | their comfort zone and tooling/scripts to generate
               | configurations automagically do not yet support IPv6. As
               | the company grows they hire less Sr. Network Engineers
               | and some of the new people _depend on but do not
               | understand_ the automation. _e.g. someone wrote some API
               | and they retired or changed companies_. Some tooling may
               | remain stagnant for some time. It 's also a heavy lift to
               | retrofit some enterprise environments for smaller changes
               | so people fear the outages they will induce implementing
               | IPv6. In some companies it is a _major change_ just to
               | migrate customers to a new load balancer endpoint. There
               | may also be hundreds of undocumented things _due to
               | employee churn and lack of change control_ running that
               | when broken will cause extended outages. And then there
               | is internal politics and finger pointing...
               | 
               | Again, not justifying it, rather I think there are too
               | many moving bits and complexity that people have added
               | over the decades and they are paralyzed by fear and
               | risking the loss of their paycheck. And then there is the
               | embarrassment that comes from having to acknowledge that
               | nobody knows the current state of an environment _and
               | that embarrassment can go all the way up the
               | organizational chain._
               | 
               | That is based on my experience of being brought into
               | companies with the speicifc task of, _" Hey, make this
               | simpler, reduce outages."_ It's rarely strictly a
               | technical challenge but rather having to navigate
               | politics, personality types and individual sub-org
               | leaders that have had independent control of their
               | environment for a long time. The more I think about it
               | this could be a topic in and of itself _how companies
               | induce self inflicted bloat as they grow_.
        
               | talent_deprived wrote:
               | The biggest issue is IPv6 is a privacy, wide open wild
               | west, there is no privacy on IPv6. Every device's IP is
               | literally public, on the public Internet, 24/7. All so
               | called privacy extensions or improvements do not change
               | the lack of privacy of IPv6 and one more thing, the
               | address structure sucks.
        
               | icedchai wrote:
               | IP-based "privacy" is an illusion. With IPv4, your public
               | IP (NAT router IP address) may not change for months,
               | years, and possibly not until your change your router/MAC
               | address. With IPv6 privacy extensions, your address
               | changes regularly. This seems like an improvement.
        
               | talent_deprived wrote:
               | The IPv4 at my router yes. That's where tracking ends.
               | IPv6 privacy is an illusion, try the test I described,
               | remove IPv6 from your router at home, wait a few hours or
               | few days, the family will complain search results are odd
               | or messed up and that's only the beginning of it.
               | 
               | I don't know how companies are doing it but they are able
               | to track your IPv6 changed daily or not.
        
               | icedchai wrote:
               | They probably just track the IPv6 /64. With prefix
               | delegation, the /64 would rarely change, unless your
               | provider delegated a new block. This is similar to your
               | IPv4 router changing its address w/DHCP: it happens, but
               | is relatively rare.
        
               | 10000truths wrote:
               | This is wrong. Every IPv6 interface has a link-local
               | address (which is _not_ routable outside the LAN) as well
               | as a global address. Global addresses are just addresses
               | that come from a block allocated by the IANA. It has no
               | bearing on whether the interface is reachable from the
               | public internet. Just like with IPv4 networks, a stateful
               | firewall will prevent unsolicited inbound connections.
        
               | KaiserPro wrote:
               | Every Ipv4 device has a loopback (well most do.) thats
               | not what they are on about.
               | 
               | Having NAT and a firewall gives you a better illusion of
               | privacy. Sure you can track devices from the outside
               | world, but its pretty hard.
               | 
               | If you have v6 configured in a certain way, then your IP
               | address is basically a UUID for your machine. Plus you
               | can't really just stop ICMP anymore so you can trivially
               | ping it (caveats apply)
        
               | tremon wrote:
               | Why is it wrong? You don't seem to be engaging the
               | parent's point at all, which is that IPv6 addresses are a
               | more specific identifier than current IPv4 addresses. The
               | existence of link-local addressing has no bearing on that
               | argument, because those addresses are non-routable by
               | definition. Nor does stateful firewalling prevent your
               | unique device address from being broadcast over the
               | Internet, you'd need 6-to-6 NAT to achieve that.
        
               | LinuxBender wrote:
               | FWIW this does not have to be true for companies that do
               | not wish to expose internal nodes. I'm not even talking
               | about the _privacy extensions_. I realize that people
               | beat the drums that one must not NAT IPv6 but it can
               | absolutely be a NAT just like IPv4. I would actually
               | expect in most companies that they don 't even add IPv6
               | inside their datacenters, rather they just put a block of
               | IPv6 addresses on some load balancers at the edge and
               | then point their edge devices L4 and L7 mapping to IPv4
               | nodes in their datacenter. The same could apply to
               | VPN/WAN configurations in some cases much like how mobile
               | networks are configured nowadays. There would need to be
               | some of this regardless due to ACL's required between
               | companies that don't use network VPN's for restricted
               | end-points. _e.g. PCI to PCI environments._
               | 
               | In the early days of IPv4 many big companies did not NAT
               | IPv4. I was at a company that did this. Our workstations
               | all had routable public IPv4 addresses. There are still
               | some companies that do this. One of these was a company
               | that had 20 managers and VP's on a call when I just
               | wanted to give their network engineer a CIDR block and a
               | pre-shared secret for a network VPN. I suspect they will
               | be using public IPv4 addresses internally forever. _And I
               | doubt they will ever sell their /8's unless people
               | comment on their Vogon poetry._
               | 
               | Amazon is _probably_ one of the exceptions as they have
               | so many geographically disperse configurations it would
               | be harder to continue using RFC1918 address space. Not
               | impossible, just difficult. I can think of a few other
               | big companies that do manufacturing that are spread out
               | around the world that would probably run into walls with
               | RFC1918 at some point. I 've seen some of them take over
               | public address space for internal routing which then
               | breaks access to some things on the internet _thus
               | requiring double /triple NATs_. 1/8 _assorted_ , 25/8
               | _MoD_ , 26/8 _DISA_ are a few I 've seen.
        
               | SoftTalker wrote:
               | > In the early days of IPv4 many big companies did not
               | NAT IPv4. I was at a company that did this. Our
               | workstations all had routable public IPv4 addresses.
               | 
               | A lot of big universities did this and even still do this
               | to a large degree. They got huge IPv4 allocations early
               | and there was no scarcity.
        
               | icedchai wrote:
               | All of the early Internet companies I worked at were like
               | that, up until roughly 2000: public IPs direct on the
               | desktop. My 90's home network was also like that. I had a
               | /24 block from the old class C "swamp" space. I still
               | have it, actually. It's legacy space, no ARIN fees.
        
               | talent_deprived wrote:
               | I remember the days of non-NAT IPv4, though I'd forgotten
               | until you mentioned it. I'd be OK with NAT IPv6, though
               | the addresses are still ugly and difficult to reason
               | about.
        
               | p1mrx wrote:
               | CIDR IP addresses are based on binary number prefixes. If
               | you think it's easier to reason about them in decimal
               | than hex, then you probably don't really understand
               | binary.
        
               | forty wrote:
               | I have a reason: we do per IP rate limiting. It's easy
               | enough for IPv4 when the number of IPs is necessarily not
               | too big to fit in a small redis for example, but for IPv6
               | everyone have at least a /64.
               | 
               | I'm curious how people do it btw, if you have tips to
               | share, I'm all hear. Do you simply rate limit IP ranges?
               | Even limiting per /64, it's still potentially quite a lot
               | of /64 to track.
        
               | tepmoc wrote:
               | You treat ipv6 /64 just like /32 in ipv4
        
               | Dylan16807 wrote:
               | When a bunch of households or cell phones are on the same
               | IPv4 do you have any measures to compensate?
               | 
               | > Do you simply rate limit IP ranges? Even limiting per
               | /64, it's still potentially quite a lot of /64 to track.
               | 
               | Yes you'd limit by /64 or slightly larger.
               | 
               | The live set of IPs shouldn't be very big.
        
               | forty wrote:
               | We put limits high enough that it's far enough for any
               | expected usage, including a bunch of users on a single
               | IP. If we see rate limiting happening in practice and it
               | doesn't seem to be an attack, we revisit.
        
               | Dylan16807 wrote:
               | Well it sounds like you'd do fine tracking the IPv6
               | blocks that are currently very active, without needing
               | any significant amount of resources.
               | 
               | If you go the extra mile and simultaneously track /64,
               | /56, and /48 with moderately increasing thresholds,
               | you'll probably end up causing _less_ collateral damage
               | when you block someone than with IPv4.
        
               | forty wrote:
               | Answering myself: I found this interesting article
               | https://adam-p.ca/blog/2022/02/ipv6-rate-limiting/
        
               | tremon wrote:
               | Given that the only routable IPv6 address space is in the
               | 2002:: address range (is 2003:: in use yet?), and the
               | standing recommendation for ISP CPE endpoints is to
               | allocate a /48 per customer (if you only allocate a /64
               | to a customer, they can't do local subnetting at all),
               | the effective address space for rate-limiting is the
               | exact same size as the current IPv4 address space (you
               | only need to track bits 16-47).
               | 
               | It's possible that cloud providers assign smaller ranges
               | to their customers, so you may need to allocate more bits
               | for granularity in that case; on the other hand, one
               | might naively assume that cloud providers are more
               | responsive to abuse reports than ISP's.
        
               | mr_mitm wrote:
               | It's definitely "best practice" to turn off features you
               | don't need. Who knows, maybe in five years someone will
               | find a bad bug in the implementation of the IPv6 stack,
               | then you'll be glad you decreased your attack surface.
               | 
               | Not saying this is what you should do, just a common
               | rationalization.
        
               | icedchai wrote:
               | It's also "best practice" to learn a new, foundational
               | technology (like IPv6) sooner than later, perhaps less
               | than 20 years after it was first available.
        
               | dilyevsky wrote:
               | Right and what is better way to learn than deploying
               | random features to prod!
        
               | icedchai wrote:
               | Did I say they had to deploy it to production? If they
               | deployed it in dev and test environments even a few years
               | ago, they might have some experience deploying it in prod
               | today.
        
               | aidenn0 wrote:
               | Mainly that everything is publicly routable.
               | 
               | People see a 10.x and instantly know it can't be reached
               | from the public internet. IPv6 is much harder. For
               | internal-only stuff there is the fd00::/8 block, which
               | AWS actually does use, but there is no equivalent range
               | for outgoing-only connections.
        
               | baby_souffle wrote:
               | It's a big scary number and the letters just break
               | understanding.
               | 
               | There are some annoying operational issues around it as
               | well, common one: DNS hostnames for devices that only do
               | SLAAC
        
               | mschuster91 wrote:
               | Because there's _a lot_ of shit that still doesn 't work
               | well with IPv4. Logging is one good example - a lot of
               | software that uses its database for event logs has the
               | database column for remote_ip defined as VARCHAR(15), you
               | can guess the rest of what happens when deploying that
               | with IPv6 enabled.
        
               | icedchai wrote:
               | These things take time. I mean, it's only been 25+ years
               | since the first IPv6 RFC was released...
        
               | icedchai wrote:
               | It's simple fear of the unknown. Many folks haven't
               | learned it, so they just turn it off... Ignore it, kick
               | the can down the road.
        
               | nerdponx wrote:
               | It's individuals responding to the incentives before
               | them. If something goes wrong because they're using IPv6,
               | it's their fault. If you never upgrade anything until
               | you're forced to, then you can never break anything by
               | upgrading, and you're never seen as a "stuff breaker".
        
               | tormeh wrote:
               | This is it. Having broken stuff by upgrading myself, I
               | can say it does not make you popular. This is especially
               | the case if what the upgrade did was tighten up some bug
               | that it turns hid a bug in your team's code...
        
             | vorpalhex wrote:
             | I was troubleshooting some bad routing in a service. Some
             | endpoints worked fine most of the time but would
             | occasionally lose packets for a bit.
             | 
             | Turns out it's a bug in the kube stack when containers have
             | both ipv4 and ipv6 addresses.
             | 
             | This was last year.
             | 
             | I suspect the ipv6 cases aren't being tested very well
             | across the software stack.
        
           | rewmie wrote:
           | > I've lost track of all of the "Private Endpoints", "Private
           | Links", "Service Endpoints", "Private Resolvers" and "Virtual
           | WAN" products they've introduced... all to make IPv4 work at
           | scale.
           | 
           | I'm not sure what you've been reading, but the concept of a
           | private link has absolutely nothing to do with IPv4 vs IPv6.
           | In fact, practically all your remarks don't involve the issue
           | at all.
           | 
           | The most charitable interpretation of your comment is that
           | you're making the mistake of conflating any application
           | involving a virtual network as something caused or involing
           | IPv4.
        
             | jiggawatts wrote:
             | I replied to someone else's similar misconception of what
             | problem Private Link solves here:
             | https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=37609614
             | 
             | Hint: it's a complex workaround for insufficient IPv4
             | addresses.
        
               | rewmie wrote:
               | I think your comment shows a high dose of ignorance and
               | complete lack of research on the topic. The whole point
               | of private link is to not route traffic over the
               | internet, and instead flow traffic between private
               | networks through private pipes.
               | 
               | One of the primary usecases and design requirements for
               | this service is regulatory compliance. They say right on
               | the tin that the service is designed to send traffic over
               | private networks, including AWS's own global network. The
               | whole point of private link is to ship data through the
               | pipes you own, instead of routing it through the wild. I
               | don't know how you could have missed that.
               | 
               | More importantly, you really need to want to use private
               | link connections. This is a value-added service. You need
               | to want to go out of your way to avoid your traffic to go
               | through the internet to onboard both ends of your
               | services to private link.
               | 
               | Not only are your conspiratorial hypothesis completely
               | out of base, even your baseless assumptions have
               | absolutely no relation with what version of the IP
               | protocol is in place.
               | 
               | I'm the first to join in on any good old fashioned
               | AWS/big cloud provider bashing, but these should be
               | grounded on reality.
        
               | jiggawatts wrote:
               | If you think that either Azure or AWS loop terabits of
               | customer traffic between two of their own services "out
               | to the Internet" and back just because the IPv4 octets
               | don't start with a "10", then you're the one who's
               | missing the big picture.
        
               | NovemberWhiskey wrote:
               | I am at a total loss to understand the link between this
               | post and the prior one - can you explain?
        
               | icedchai wrote:
               | Yep. Pick your poison. You're either nickle-and-dimed for
               | a "NAT gateway" or overpaying for "VPC endpoints". Often,
               | it's both. I preferred the EC2-classic days, honestly.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | JackSlateur wrote:
               | Private link is a clever way to implement real network
               | segmentation
               | 
               | That is, when you have a customer in some network and a
               | provider in another network, you had to implement full
               | connectivity between the customer and the provider
               | 
               | With private link, you can remove all that connectivity,
               | and instead expose the provider' _service_ to the
               | customer The service, nothing more, so just one endpoint
               | 
               | This is really good from a security point of view, but
               | also for managing your stuff (especially if there are
               | multiple teams in the compagny): because you now have a
               | resource, you can easily list the services you expose to
               | other people, and whom are your customers
        
               | cduzz wrote:
               | The IPv6 version of this would be ...
               | 
               | 1. get list of customer netblocks
               | 
               | 2. setup "internal" service(s) for customers
               | 
               | 3. setup firewall rules to allow customer <-> service
               | allow list
               | 
               | 4. setup DNS records
               | 
               | 5. tell customers DNS and API targets
        
               | JackSlateur wrote:
               | There is no "ipv6 version of this", private links have no
               | business with layer 3 stuff
        
         | benterix wrote:
         | I'm not convinced these 2 are related. If AWS wanted, they
         | could start promoting IPv6 as a panacea to all internal network
         | problems (if they had it working, that is), and the competition
         | would have a hard time catching up. My guess is the reason is
         | more mundane: supporting IPv4 is just easier, especially if you
         | take into account the number of their services.
        
           | 9dev wrote:
           | While this is probably exactly the spin the AWS sales team
           | head in mind, it conveniently glosses over all the IPv4
           | related products customers won't need anymore if they use
           | IPv6, and thus pay a lot less for their simplified network
           | infrastructure.
           | 
           | AWS has no incentive to support IPv6 from a sales
           | perspective.
        
             | supriyo-biswas wrote:
             | In addition, IPv4 addresses are an asset that has monetary
             | value; and there's no reason AWS would want to drive down
             | the value of the asset by helping customers migrate to
             | IPv6.
        
               | ttegloma wrote:
               | Sure there is. AWS has a vested interest in the value of
               | IPv4 going down as much as possible.
               | 
               | Owning IPv4 addresses is a requirement of AWS's core
               | business. Unless people stop using IPv4, then AWS cannot
               | sell those addresses. There is no incentive for the
               | addresses to increase in value.
               | 
               | Further, if people continue to use IPv4, then AWS has to
               | continue to acquire even more IPv4, and AWS wants the
               | price of those to go down so that acquiring them is
               | cheaper (or wants people to stop using IPv4 so that they
               | can stop spending money on them altogether).
        
               | jen20 wrote:
               | > Unless people stop using IPv4, then AWS cannot sell
               | those addresses. There is no incentive for the addresses
               | to increase in value.
               | 
               | But if people stop using IPv4, the asset (billions of
               | dollars by some accounts) becomes worthless... AWS are
               | passing on the cost for public IPv4 addresses now, so
               | there's even less incentive.
        
               | kaliszad wrote:
               | Have you heard of the Jevons paradox
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox? It is
               | really insightful. If you make something more efficient/
               | easier to use, people will use more of it. That is
               | exactly what I think about the switch from IPv4 -> IPv6.
               | Networking is really complicated now and if you happen to
               | make it just a bit easier and cheaper, people will use it
               | and the related services more.
               | 
               | Stateful NAT is a real burden on bigger networks and is
               | at least a chore on smaller networks. It at least doubles
               | the complexity of managing a network especially when you
               | have a DMZ that should be used from some "private" and
               | some "public" endpoints.
        
         | cameronh90 wrote:
         | It's not just AWS. Microsoft, security auditors, penetration
         | testers, cyber insurance companies, etc. also largely insist on
         | not having publicly addressable endpoints.
         | 
         | I don't understand why, but until some large tech company
         | starts pushing for end to end addressability as best practice,
         | I have no choice but to follow the conventional wisdom to avoid
         | throwing up red flags.
        
           | throw0101c wrote:
           | > _Microsoft, security auditors, penetration testers, cyber
           | insurance companies, etc. also largely insist on not having
           | publicly addressable endpoints._
           | 
           | > _I don 't understand why_ [...]
           | 
           | Excluding Microsoft, all the others find it easier to have as
           | a checkbox to make it easier to confirm that "internal" hosts
           | are actually (theoretically) internal since RFC 1918 isn't
           | allowed outside.
           | 
           | Of course most companies' firewall and NAT rules are probably
           | all sorts of complicated once you get to a certain size
           | (never mind stale open-rules which were never cleaned up), so
           | a bunch stuff is probably accidentally exposed. Also, most
           | attacks are probably from compromised clients nowadays, so
           | even internal hosts need to be locked down as the castle-and-
           | moat security model isn't (as) valid.
           | 
           | But having "internal-only" hosts is low-hanging fruit on the
           | security checklist.
        
           | otabdeveloper4 wrote:
           | > I don't understand why
           | 
           | I will resist the urge to be snarky at your expense and
           | politely point out that exposing your LAN to public routing
           | tables is madness, from all perspectives.
           | 
           | It brings no benefits and carries huge risks.
        
             | tremon wrote:
             | Is IPv6 Unique Local Addressing still a thing (or again)?
             | Just because a machine has an IPv6 address does not mean it
             | is automatically routable over the entire Internet.
        
         | bushbaba wrote:
         | Maybe just maybe. Customers don't really want IPv6 but are
         | forced onto it. Ipv6 is not human usable and gets rid of a
         | bunch of network design norms.
        
           | paulddraper wrote:
           | Humans don't use IP.
           | 
           | Computers do.
        
           | supriyo-biswas wrote:
           | This "human usable" argument gets trotted out so much on here
           | and elsewhere, but the same people would be surprised to know
           | about HTTP/2, TLS and the like, which by that definition,
           | isn't human usable either because of binary formats and
           | encryption.
           | 
           | People never interact with these protocols directly and use a
           | layer of indirection such as a HTTP/2 client for HTTP, and
           | the same applies for IPv6: use DNS (or your hosts file).
        
             | butlerm wrote:
             | There are a number of relevant issues here, including the
             | general problem that DNS is not trustable and is not
             | reliable or not reliable enough to use for configuring
             | routers and firewalls. It is not even necessarily
             | accessible or usable for reverse lookup at all. DNS wasn't
             | really designed for common cases where network
             | administrators enter IP address prefixes. That could
             | probably fixed to some degree using a name system that was
             | designed for security use, including operation when the
             | network is partitioned or wildly malfunctioning.
             | 
             | And of course the need to maintain two sets of IP addresses
             | and two sets of IP address prefixes - even and especially
             | in DNS itself - is probably the number one factor slowing
             | down the deployment of IPv6. That and far too many places,
             | far too many interfaces, far too many protocols, and far
             | too many APIs (notably Berkeley sockets) that are not
             | transparent to which network layer protocol is being used
             | or what the address format is. The wire format, transfer
             | format, configuration format, and administration of DNS
             | address records is a case in point.
        
               | supriyo-biswas wrote:
               | Adding another DNS record or changing a socket listener
               | is hardly the issue though. Most sysadmins are unfamiliar
               | with IPv6 networking concepts such as NDP, DHCPv6 and so
               | on, and having to learn a new system is what hinders its
               | adoption.
               | 
               | Unfortunately, such changes are quite common in
               | networking; Linux networking has many moving parts these
               | days, there was the move to iproute2 and nftables, and
               | the like, so one can only try to best keep up with the
               | changes.
        
             | NoZebra120vClip wrote:
             | > the same applies for IPv6: use DNS (or your hosts file).
             | 
             | And for reverse DNS, PTR records? What should we use there?
        
               | supriyo-biswas wrote:
               | If you're setting up your private DNS resolvers, you can
               | add PTR records to it. There's nothing special about PTR
               | records in IPv6, they're just DNS records for
               | "in6-addr.arpa" instead of "in-addr.arpa".
        
               | NoZebra120vClip wrote:
               | How many PTR records should you add for the customary
               | 64-bit Interface ID that applies to one device configured
               | with SLAAC?
               | 
               | https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8501#page-4
        
           | xnyanta wrote:
           | >norms
           | 
           | More like it gets rid of band-aids
        
           | icedchai wrote:
           | If you remember the early Internet (the 90's, before NAT took
           | off), you'd realize end-to-end connectivity, globally unique
           | addresses is actually the norm. IPv6 is bringing that back. I
           | remember having public IPv4 on my desktop!
        
           | WorldMaker wrote:
           | Some of these "not human usable" complaints about
           | typing/memorizing/pattern matching IPv6 addresses remind me
           | of how long the distributed version control industry
           | struggled with content-addressed storage and how "human
           | usable" it was or was not. As the legends go Monotone spent
           | years of engineering and lots of complicated code trying to
           | build nice human usable sequence numbers in a distributed
           | fashion, and then git just said "do the simple, stupid thing:
           | show the (prefix of the) hash, people will adapt" and people
           | did.
           | 
           | IPv6 doesn't seem "human usable" sometimes in large part
           | because you aren't actually using it. People adapt. The human
           | skills in pattern matching are robust: there are new tricks
           | to learn, but there were always tricks to learn. (IPv4
           | addresses aren't "human usable" either if you sit down to
           | truly assess absolutely how many RFCs are involved to build
           | the patterns "everyone" has internalized that seem "easy".
           | They are easy because they are familiar, because you use them
           | often, because you've already adapted to them.)
        
         | rewmie wrote:
         | > These provide a strong lock-in effect when customers spend
         | effort to build the complex infrastructure for them in the name
         | of security, even though in reality they hurt security through
         | unnecessary complexity, addressing ambiguity, etc.
         | 
         | How do you hurt security by preventing external access to your
         | internal services?
        
           | 9dev wrote:
           | By making it necessary to use automated tooling and even
           | obtain certifications just to set up everything required for
           | private networking. The complexity of a properly configured
           | service mesh in AWS is staggering, extremely hard for newbies
           | to get right, and easy to fuck up big time down the road.
           | _That_ hurts security.
        
             | rewmie wrote:
             | > By making it necessary to use automated tooling
             | 
             | It isn't.
             | 
             | > and even obtain certifications
             | 
             | No, not really.
             | 
             | > just to set up everything required for private
             | networking.
             | 
             | Frankly, no.
             | 
             | I'm tempted to agree only in one aspect, which is
             | apparently you are completely unfamiliar with the topic,
             | and the degree of confusion you are showing in your
             | comments suggest you would benefit from an introductory
             | course on the topic, or in the very lease a 5-minute read
             | through the service's documentation.
             | 
             | Certification wold only help because you would need to
             | learn the basics to pass those, and learning the basics
             | would be enough to prevent you to fill in the gaps in your
             | understanding with fabricated nonsense.
             | 
             | > The complexity of a properly configured service mesh in
             | AWS is staggering, extremely hard for newbies to get right,
             | and easy to fuck up big time down the road. That hurts
             | security.
             | 
             | People being way over their head because they can't even
             | grasp a FAQ will definitely hurt security, but the root
             | cause of this failure mode is sheer incompetence.
             | 
             | As the saying goes, poor craftsman blame their tools, and
             | here you are with a tool-blaming fest.
        
             | vasachi wrote:
             | Are hundreds of publicly addressable services better?
        
               | amluto wrote:
               | Yes, because publicly addressable does not mean publicly
               | accessible. Set the ACLs to deny by default.
               | 
               | In the v4 world, one can easily accidentally allow access
               | by inadvertently sending traffic toward the wrong group
               | of colliding addresses or otherwise messing up any of a
               | number of things that ought not to be necessary in the
               | first place.
        
               | otabdeveloper4 wrote:
               | You need both firewalls and private addresses, of course.
               | 
               | Anything else is amateur hour madness.
        
               | amluto wrote:
               | Why do I need private addresses?
               | 
               | Okay, in real life I need private addresses because I
               | connect to things that are only available over IPv4. So
               | there's some negotiation to make sure that my private
               | network does not have an addressing conflict with the
               | other network, there are NATs in the way, and traceroute
               | gives output that is every bit as bad as you would
               | expect. The ACLs that everyone (arguably quite
               | reasonably) sets up suck are fiddly because the clients
               | _don't have well defined address ranges_. When people
               | allocate  /24 subsets out of IPv4 private space, the
               | probability of collision is annoyingly high. Amateur hour
               | indeed.
               | 
               | I would take globally unique but "private" IPv6
               | addresses, over private links, with private routes
               | (dynamic or static), and ACLs that actually make sense
               | any day. Heck, I would happily go IPv6 only!
        
               | icedchai wrote:
               | You don't need private addresses. You may need _non-
               | routable_ addresses, but they do not need to come from a
               | "private" network range.
        
           | fulafel wrote:
           | Was this a jeopardy style reply?
           | 
           | In case not: it's about doing it the wrong way (excess
           | complexity and ambiguity -> hard to
           | understand/analyze/monitor). Using globally addressing is
           | orthogonal to controlling access to your internal services -
           | you can do it using firewalling or various other means. Eg on
           | AWS you get a default-deny firewall.
        
         | beoberha wrote:
         | I work in Azure, but my experience is that customers want this
         | - and for good reason. Customers want their own private network
         | to prevent intrusions and exfiltrations, just on machines they
         | don't own. Or even better, put the nice fancy batteries
         | included PaaS services in these networks too.
        
           | xnyanta wrote:
           | I see this at work, being within such a customer. People
           | driving these mandates barely understand IPv4, let alone know
           | what IPv6 is. They're software developers after all, not
           | CCIEs.
           | 
           | There's nothing preventing you from having a private network
           | using unique address space that's either blocked from
           | accessing the internet via a firewall on a router or just
           | plain not even routed. You could even use ULA networks with
           | stateless prefix translation to avoid using GUA addressing
           | for your private network.
           | 
           | The sad part is that IPv6 support is abysmal on every cloud
           | so just migrating to it imposes serious limitations as
           | addressed by the blog author.
        
           | jojobas wrote:
           | Right, cause customers are too stupid to manage their own
           | IPv6 firewalls, it's for their own good! /s
        
             | rad_gruchalski wrote:
             | I'm pretty confident that this statement is mostly true
             | without sarcasm, and that you are in the minority.
        
               | pantalaimon wrote:
               | How is managing a NAT easier than managing a firewall?
        
               | ninkendo wrote:
               | I'm one typo away from accidentally allowing IPv6 access
               | to every machine in my network with my pf config on my
               | home router. (I know this because I've done it one time,
               | and didn't notice for about a week.)
               | 
               | There is no such typo i could make with my single shared
               | public ipv4 address because it's just one address. Saying
               | "allow" by accident isn't enough, I'd have to somehow
               | accidentally configure the particular ingress port to NAT
               | to a particular internal machine, and even then it would
               | only affect that machine and no other.
               | 
               | (Full disclosure, i actually like IPv6 and am in full
               | favor of everything moving to it. This is in spite of the
               | above, but i at least recognize that the above is the
               | case.)
        
             | thebytefairy wrote:
             | I work with Fortune 50s in cloud, and they can barely
             | manage ipv4. If you're in a digital native it's different,
             | but in my experience most behemoths do not inspire
             | confidence with how on top of their network infrastructure
             | they are.
        
               | amluto wrote:
               | This is a bit like saying "customers can barely manage
               | driving a stick shift with a manual choke -- we shouldn't
               | let them drive automatics!"
               | 
               | IPv6 isn't amazing, but it makes many of these problems
               | simply disappear. _Of course [0]_ networks should be
               | isolated, but this should be achieved with a firewall
               | that, by default, disallows connections between the
               | public Internet and private networks. And that's about it
               | -- every VM has a globally unique address, routing just
               | works, one company (if permitted) can connect to another
               | company's endpoints, firewalls can be deployed where they
               | make sense instead of being forced to exist exactly where
               | inconsistently-addressed networks meet, etc.
               | 
               | The entire mess of designing and negotiating allocation
               | of extremely limited IPv4 addresses for private systems
               | simply disappears!
               | 
               | [0] Beyond corp has something to say about this.
        
             | vasachi wrote:
             | Well, I wouldn't put _any_ service on a public network,
             | unless it is explicitly required. Firewall is all well and
             | good, but security in depth is even better.
             | 
             | Private networking is good. IPv6 doesn't help here at all.
        
               | solatic wrote:
               | The easiest firewall in the world is one that is set up
               | to deny all traffic from all sources. Which is how any
               | decent firewall is configured by default anyway.
               | 
               | I'm not saying that running a private network doesn't
               | provide genuine security value, only that it drastically
               | complicates your networking architecture for very little
               | security benefit. Organizations can decide whether that
               | trade-off is worth it, for organizations with deep threat
               | models like militaries and banks, it's probably worth it.
               | For 99% of the private sector, it's folly.
        
               | fulafel wrote:
               | This phrasing is really problematic. Using internet
               | addressing (vs ambiguous addresses) does not make your
               | network "public". Just like using unique MAC addresses
               | doesn't. Confusing global addressing with public
               | reachabiliy is exactly the rhetoric used by AWS, Azure
               | etc to scare people into building mazes of ambiguously
               | addressed 10.x networks.
        
               | vasachi wrote:
               | What? Private networks are defined as networks, that use
               | private address ranges[0]. They are most certainly not
               | AWS "rhetoric".
               | 
               | And why are unique MAC addresses a problem?
               | 
               | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network
        
               | fulafel wrote:
               | I was referring to "public network".
               | 
               | (Though that WP page seems also to have self-coined the
               | "private network" phrase and I don't think it's an
               | estabilished term in this meaning. The first and second
               | references off the leading paragraph talk about "private
               | internets" and "unique local addresses" respectively).
        
               | vasachi wrote:
               | "Public network" can mean many things, but in context of
               | IP addresses it usually means a network, that uses a
               | globally addressable IP range. Now, that doesn't mean
               | that the network is globally accessible. It can be
               | tightly firewalled.
        
               | MayeulC wrote:
               | "Private networking" as defined by assigning private-
               | range IP addresses are only private as long as there is
               | no route to your network, or as long as it's isolated on
               | a dedicated vlan (even then, there could be some rogue
               | machines).
               | 
               | In the first case, you need a firewall for IPv4 anyway.
               | In the second case, that would also work with IPv6.
               | 
               | Disclaimer: I know nothing about Azure/AWS internals.
        
               | Shorel wrote:
               | Therefore job security of old school network
               | administrators is the main factor against IPv6 coverage.
               | 
               | Hopefully one of the big cloud providers figures it is in
               | their best interest to have a much bigger address space
               | and make all this busywork sinecure obsolete.
        
               | vasachi wrote:
               | Good luck administering IPv6 networks, they are so much
               | easier to understand.
        
           | throw0101b wrote:
           | > _Customers want their own private network to prevent
           | intrusions and exfiltrations, just on machines they don't
           | own._
           | 
           | If your (default) gateway from one network segment to another
           | network segment only has one rule, default-deny, then it's
           | not a problem. If you think that's not enough, then use IPv6
           | ULA (fd00::/8).
           | 
           | But why should the incompetence of _some_ customers limit
           | what _all_ customers can do?
        
         | NovemberWhiskey wrote:
         | > _not internet style architectures with end-to-end
         | addressing._
         | 
         | The inside of my service is not the internet, even though my
         | service may be exposed on the internet; why would I want
         | internal implementation details externalized?
        
       | mabbo wrote:
       | Many years ago when I was a junior dev at Amazon, there was a
       | massive project internally to split up every internal system into
       | regional versions with limited gateways allowing calls between
       | regions. The reason? We had run out of internal IPv4 addresses.
       | 
       | The Principal PM in charge of the "regionalization" effort was
       | asked in a Q&A "why didn't we just switch to IPv6?".
       | 
       | Her answer was something along the lines of "The number of
       | internal networking devices we currently have that cannot support
       | IPv6 is so large that to replace them we would have needed to buy
       | nearly the entire world's yearly output of those devices, and
       | then install them all."[0]
       | 
       | It's easy to presume malicious intent on the IPv4 front from
       | Amazon, but with so many AWS systems being on the scale they are
       | at, I find it easy to believe that replacing all of the old
       | network hardware may just be a project too large to do on a short
       | timescale.
       | 
       | [0] - At least, that's my memory of it. I'm sure that's not an
       | entirely accurate quotation.
        
         | housemusicfan wrote:
         | Hanlon's razor applies here.
         | 
         | There is no reason any company of any size should run out of
         | IPv4 addresses internally, IF they are doing proper IP
         | management. If I were to wager a guess I'd say there was a lot
         | of waste going on, issuing /24s or larger to teams when all
         | they need are /29s etc. It adds up over time. Once they exhaust
         | private IP space they can always buy more at auction. They are
         | Amazon after all, there's no shortage of money. This is just
         | mismanagement of resources.
        
           | secabeen wrote:
           | Comcast has 29.6 million Internet subscribers:
           | https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/comcast-statistics/
           | 
           | If you wanted to assign a single non-routable IP in the 10/8
           | space to each of those cable modems, they would be 13 million
           | IPs short.
        
           | ben0x539 wrote:
           | Can you elaborate on proper IP management? Isn't that sort of
           | what the parent post is talking about with splitting the
           | network into regional chunks?
           | 
           | I'd imagine few service teams at Amazon would get very far
           | with a /29, let alone a /24, if they have to put all their
           | stuff on that.
        
         | Twirrim wrote:
         | I remember the regionalisation, that was "fun" to be on the
         | sidelines for (I was in a newer service that was regionalised
         | from the get-go). I don't remember who the PM was for that one,
         | but I remember that being when I truly came to respect the
         | value that a TPM can add.
         | 
         | You're right about the cost and need to replace network
         | equipment being one of the strong reasons why they didn't.
         | Amazon used its own in-house designed and built network gear
         | for a variety of reasons (IIRC there's a re:invent talk about
         | it), which I'm sure is probably still the case. Every single
         | one of those machines had fixed memory capacity and would need
         | to be replaced to bump up the memory sufficiently large enough
         | to handle IPv6 routing table needs etc. What they had wouldn't
         | even be enough if they'd have chosen to go IPv6 Only (which you
         | couldn't get through except via dual stack IPv4/IPv6 anyway).
        
           | NBJack wrote:
           | Were they also by chance considered accelerators for
           | encrypted traffic?
           | 
           | I'm not privy to details, but I recall once when a mandate
           | was issued to a Java platform to remove an outdated
           | encryption protocol (mandated by Amazon Infosec). The change
           | was made and rolled out with little fanfare.
           | 
           | A few weeks later, a large outage of Amazon Video (which used
           | said platform) occurred on a Friday evening. Root cause? The
           | network hardware accelerators were only setup to use that
           | outdated protocol, which in turn meant that encryption was
           | happening in software instead. Under load, the video hosting
           | eventually caved.
           | 
           | Might be specific to the hardware used for Amazon retail, but
           | it reinforces the point of their home grown (and now aging)
           | stack.
        
             | jonhohle wrote:
             | Maybe not the same story, but there was a sidecar service
             | for encrypting traffic and doing access control and other
             | things in a way that was transparent to the app (like
             | Envoy, but without the mesh and much earlier). The original
             | version was written by (maybe) a single engineer in Erlang.
             | Version two was given to another team and rewritten in Java
             | because. They had never tested at scale and every team I
             | know who went to production with it fell over. There was
             | some company wide deadline, but it was unusable, at the
             | point, and the teams I was working with were gun shy to try
             | it again since it was obvious that the owning team had know
             | idea what the performance characteristics or system
             | requirements were for it.
             | 
             | I think I switched teams before that was resolved and moved
             | to some greenfield work where we didn't have to worry about
             | scale for a while, but I do believe they eventually figure
             | it out.
        
         | KaiserPro wrote:
         | I can believe that, but also, places like google and facebook
         | saw the problem of having >1million devices and the lack of IP
         | addresses and moved to ipv6.
        
         | pmarreck wrote:
         | So basically, their IPv4 infrastructure investment is so
         | entrenched that they're trapped.
         | 
         | Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a market upstart to start
         | out v6-only...
        
           | flerchin wrote:
           | LOL
        
         | devwastaken wrote:
         | Even cheap consumer hardware supports ipv6. There are
         | significant financial incentives to continue the capitalism of
         | ipv4 addresses. Like NFT's - an artificially limited capital.
         | To create more addresses means more competition, loss of
         | capital. Therefore they will spend billions on continually
         | reworking internal IPV4 than going for the proper solution.
        
           | mannyv wrote:
           | You obviously have never been on the backend of a big
           | enterprise deployment.
           | 
           | The world is bigger than your apartment.
        
             | 0x457 wrote:
             | I worked in a company where we had network equipment all
             | over the world.
             | 
             | Often IPv6 and IPv4 paths were entirely different and
             | latency on IPv6 was much bigger, so we had to measure
             | latency between nodes on both. Also, sometimes IPv4 was a
             | symmetrical, but IPv6 wasn't. As a result, we had to buy
             | tons of IPv4 addresses.
             | 
             | Our control plane was on IPv6, but data-plane had to be on
             | both.
        
         | jongjong wrote:
         | I upgraded a P2P networking library recently to add support for
         | IPv6. That was a pure software solution and it required a lot
         | of work. When you have to upgrade hardware as well, I can
         | imagine it would present a massive challenge (especially
         | logistically). You'd have to upgrade ALL the hardware before
         | you even start thinking about the software side of the
         | equation.
        
         | tinix wrote:
         | this doesn't forgo v6 phase-in though, can't kick that can down
         | the road forever.
         | 
         | surely they started the process...
         | 
         | right? i cannot imagine AWS just sticking head in the ground
         | and ignoring this...
        
           | Twirrim wrote:
           | No one is ignoring it, and the US Government has done
           | everyone another favour on this score. Years ago in the late
           | Bush / early Obama administration, NIST required that all
           | federal government agencies have IPv6 at the border. Federal
           | government money is not to be sniffed at, and that had the
           | effect of forcing a number of vendors to add IPv6 support. A
           | few years after that, it became that the federal agencies
           | needed to have dual-stack IPv4/IPv6.
           | 
           | About 18 months ago, the requirement came that federal
           | agencies are required to be IPv6 Only, dropping the dual
           | stack. IIRC they have until 2025 to do that. This has the
           | neat effect of forcing all vendors to make IPv6 a first class
           | citizen. The extra little fun from this is that it applies to
           | the military JWCC contract that all the major clouds have
           | been trying to land. The timescales of JWCC meant that
           | initial offerings are pretty bare, but that won't be allowed
           | to last.
        
             | pknomad wrote:
             | Yep.
             | 
             | I work a federal entity tied to DoE and that's the biggest
             | workstream cut out for us. 90% of our environment is either
             | dual stacked or IPv6 native. We would love to kick IPv4 out
             | under us and go full IPv6. Problem is that the vendors who
             | are largely private don't have the same mandate so there's
             | varying degree of "we support IPv6" which makes planning
             | bit more difficult (especially at the discovery stage).
        
               | Twirrim wrote:
               | >Problem is that the vendors who are largely private
               | don't have the same mandate
               | 
               | They get to decide how much that sweet federal $$$$ is
               | worth to them. For most vendors, it's hopefully worth too
               | much to ignore.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | mtnGoat wrote:
           | Yes they are working on it. A number of services already
           | support v6, more to come.
        
             | AdamJacobMuller wrote:
             | 1 is a number.
             | 
             | 0 is also a number.
        
         | jvolkman wrote:
         | Hah, I worked on the hardware loadbalancer team during that
         | period. Fun times.
        
         | thatsBs369 wrote:
         | That's BS and you know it -- they could have supported IPv6
         | from the beginning, AWS isn't THAT old!
         | 
         | Amazon is just ran by incompetents who think they know
         | everything just because they lied their way through an
         | interview.
        
         | aranchelk wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | ketralnis wrote:
           | > FUD-filled network engineers
           | 
           | FUD sounds like a mean way to say unproven in production
        
           | jvolkman wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | thatsBs369 wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | paulddraper wrote:
           | Right?? How old of a device you would have to get to NOT have
           | IPv6 support?
           | 
           | EDIT: But maybe bugs, IDK.
        
             | kjs3 wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | jjoonathan wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
             | 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
             | 
             | 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 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | It's their baby lol
        
           | discodave wrote:
           | 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 :)
        
             | hughesjj wrote:
             | You're talking about snowfort, and while ip exhaustion was
             | one reason, it's also an isolation/fault tolerance/security
             | thing.
        
               | foobiekr wrote:
               | Indeed, blast radius is a real concern that a lot of
               | folks who try and imitate aws have to learn about the
               | hard way.
        
             | jonhohle wrote:
             | ssh'ing through bastions was such a pain! We used the JMX
             | GUI to review some AMP details from time to time, and port
             | forwarding through the bastions was frowned upon, but our
             | workflow was broken, what were we to do?
             | 
             | IIRC, early on on that project the gateways would get
             | overwhelmed at the volume of traffic they were handling
             | between various VPCs and had to be rolled back several
             | times early on.
             | 
             | Of all the transitions I dealt with at Amazon, snowfort may
             | have been my least favorite (though the ACL/role migration
             | was pretty frustrating as well).
        
             | adamsb6 wrote:
             | Facebook started its transition to make everything*
             | internally IPv6 slightly before then.
             | 
             | It was indeed a lot of work. But worth it.
             | 
             | * When I was there we still had a handful of weird things
             | that couldn't be made IPv6. If you needed to access such
             | things you could get a dual-stack dev server.
        
             | jvolkman wrote:
             | My favorite region isolation oversight was when someone
             | realized that the perl cron job that iterated over every
             | border router globally and applied ACL updates 2-3x per day
             | didn't pay attention to isolation at all, and could easily
             | have just started blackholing the entire network one device
             | at a time if someone configured a bad rule.
             | 
             | The mitigation was to sort routers by hostname which began
             | with the regional airport codes (iad, pdx, etc.), and pause
             | for 15 minutes each time the first three letters changed to
             | give folks on-call time to react.
        
             | foobiekr wrote:
             | This really would not have been true for vendor network
             | gear of the sort AWS had been buying for years by 2014.
             | It's possible that their own switches or the weird fabric
             | they have internally wouldn't have worked with v6, or there
             | were Annapurna NIC ASIC issues, but their primary vendors
             | all would have been fine.
             | 
             | I'm not saying there aren't v6 issues (for some vendors,
             | resource exhaustion might have come into play) or bugs, but
             | there's no way it's that massive a problem. There are huge
             | and complex all v6 networks all over the planet that have
             | more stringent requirements (by law) than AWS DCs.
        
             | rekoil wrote:
             | Tell me more about these "pizza teams".
        
               | whoknew1122 wrote:
               | The idea is internal teams should be no bigger than what
               | can be fed by 2 pizzas.
        
               | lagniappe wrote:
               | But I don't like working alone :(
        
               | edvinbesic wrote:
               | slam dunk.
        
               | NooneAtAll3 wrote:
               | oh
               | 
               | so they don't own 2 pizzerias? :(
        
         | Dwedit wrote:
         | Out of IP addresses? Just use NAT.
        
           | kibwen wrote:
           | 32-bit IPv4 addresses are wasteful. By leveraging NAT, we can
           | get away with a 1-bit addressing scheme and save 31 bits per
           | packet!
        
         | irrational wrote:
         | > replacing all of the old network hardware may just be a
         | project too large to do on a short timescale.
         | 
         | If that is the case, then Amazon should hold off on charging
         | for IPv4 on a short timescale until they have replaced all the
         | old hardware and can support IPv6 internally everywhere.
        
         | grogenaut wrote:
         | I believe the PM was Laura Grit, who was actually a TPM I
         | believe. Laura is a Distinguished Engineer now. She seems to
         | constantly do massive scale projects. IPv4 being a smaller one
         | now. Sadly I can't share some of the big projects she's doing
         | now. I've gotten some sage advice from her on a few occasions
         | that she had time and appreciate it.
        
           | virtuallynathan wrote:
           | Yep, she was behind regionalization and IPv6 and such. I
           | recall reading the same the the parent comment talks about.
        
           | justrealist wrote:
           | > the PM was Laura Grit
           | 
           | Talk about nominative determinism...
        
             | cbreezyyall wrote:
             | Imagine never being able to be lazy about anything because
             | the jokes are such a layup.
        
       | peter_retief wrote:
       | I am struggling to move to IPv6, from ISP blocking to unhelpful
       | cloud services.
       | 
       | Who is a good provider of ipv6?
        
         | supriyo-biswas wrote:
         | At the ISP level, you have better chances of having IPv6
         | connectivity if you're based out of a developing country, whose
         | ISPs don't have the means to pay for too many IPv4 ranges.
         | 
         | For servers, there are plenty; AWS Lightsail, Hetzner and Vultr
         | both provide IPv6 out of the box. If you don't have an ISP
         | which provides IPv6, you could use a server and set up a
         | wireguard tunnel for IPv6 connectivity.
        
           | tyingq wrote:
           | >AWS Lightsail
           | 
           | Read the burst/throttling page carefully before you choose
           | this product.
           | 
           | https://lightsail.aws.amazon.com/ls/docs/en_us/articles/amaz.
           | ..
        
           | ninkendo wrote:
           | > you have better chances of having IPv6 connectivity if
           | you're based out of a developing country, whose ISPs don't
           | have the means to pay for too many IPv4 ranges
           | 
           | I don't know that this is true based on google's IPv6
           | adoption data: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics
           | .html#tab=per-...
           | 
           | It seems like developing nations have the worst IPv6
           | adoption, at least by a cursory look of how there's very
           | little green in Africa, for instance.
           | 
           | I think ISP's in countries with small IPv4 blocks just use
           | CGNAT.
        
             | supriyo-biswas wrote:
             | Thank you for the link. I was taking about India for the
             | most part, but it seems France, Germany, India, and Saudi
             | Arabia are the leaders in IPv6 deployment, a weird mix of
             | countries that I honestly didn't expect.
        
             | peter_retief wrote:
             | I am in South Africa that has about 3% adoption, basically
             | nothing.
        
       | dpc_01234 wrote:
       | In my experience the biggest issue for being IPv6 only in AWS is
       | that github still can't IPv6! Tons of software expects to be able
       | to reach out to github for something.
       | 
       | One can use some public NAT64 services, but that's not very
       | reliable for anything serious. https://nat64.xyz/ . AWS chargers
       | arm and leg for NAT gateways traffic, and I don't think it's
       | possible to configure them so that they only intercept traffic to
       | ipv4-only hosts (please let me know if i'm wrong).
       | 
       | Other than this being IPv6-only in AWS works flawlessly and is
       | cheaper (free egress gateways for private networks). As long as
       | you don't care about IPv4 of course - that's given.
        
       | dangus wrote:
       | The moment you have a customer with crappy legacy infrastructure
       | who refuses to allowlist anything but static IPV4 addresses, you
       | have to support IPV4.
        
       | welder wrote:
       | I use DigitalOcean... almost all their products support IPv6.
       | Only floating IPs are IPv4, but can work around that by not
       | destroying droplets so the IPv6 address doesn't change.
        
       | remram wrote:
       | Which cloud providers _does_ have good IPv6 support?
        
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