[HN Gopher] AWS charge for using IPv4 expected to bring $1B/year...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       AWS charge for using IPv4 expected to bring $1B/year and speed up
       IPv6 adoption
        
       Author : simonpure
       Score  : 181 points
       Date   : 2024-02-02 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
        
       | dboreham wrote:
       | Adoption is limited by retail ISPs that refuse to roll out IPv6.
       | But my AMZN stock thanks them.
        
         | Filligree wrote:
         | Mine has supported IPv6 for years-
         | 
         | But I refuse to let them switch me, because their IPv6 offer
         | does not include a v4 address, only CGNAT. Of course if
         | everyone was on v6 that wouldn't matter, but until then I need
         | the ability to forward ports to my server!
         | 
         | This isn't even technically in breach of the ToS; I have a
         | business line, mostly for the customer support.
         | 
         | And thus I add to the problem, because now anyone who wants to
         | connect to said server also needs a v4 option...
        
           | antongribok wrote:
           | I am honestly curious, what do you run on your server that
           | you can't connect to with Tailscale?
        
             | nfriedly wrote:
             | Not the person you're asking, but hosting a game server is
             | one example where you probably wouldn't want to go through
             | Tailscale, due to the added latency. A Plex server might be
             | another one if Tailscale has bandwidth limits. (I could be
             | wrong here - I'm on a static IP, so I've never used
             | Tailscale)
             | 
             | Also, in general, it just adds a layer of complexity that I
             | wouldn't want to deal with if I didn't have to.
        
               | rootusrootus wrote:
               | > if Tailscale has bandwidth limits. (I could be wrong
               | here - I'm on a static IP, so I've never used Tailscale)
               | 
               | Tailscale connections are primarily peer to peer. The
               | service Tailscale is providing is orchestrating the
               | connectivity and hiding the complexity, but the data
               | flows directly.
        
               | zinekeller wrote:
               | Except that P2P mode tends to simply not work in cases
               | where both of the clients are in CGNAT networks (unless
               | both of them happens to have IPv6 addresses). Even
               | Tailscale acknowledges this sad fact
               | (https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works#have-
               | you-...) because in practice CGNAT operators deploy an
               | endpoint-dependent NAT (aka symmetric NAT) without the
               | possibility of port mapping.
        
               | viraptor wrote:
               | You can use Zerotier which doesn't have the problem. Some
               | public nodes will assist with the nat traffic. It's not
               | an ideal situation to be in and it's a bit slower, but at
               | least it will work.
        
             | Filligree wrote:
             | SSH, fileserver, occasionally game servers.
             | 
             | The internet is supposed to be peer-to-peer, and I
             | shouldn't need third-parties in between my computers, or
             | between my friends and me. Switching to IPv6 breaks the
             | peer-to-peer nature of the internet.
        
               | patmorgan23 wrote:
               | Funny. The whole point of IPv6 is to restore the globally
               | addressable peer to peer nature of the Internet.
        
         | lostapathy wrote:
         | My current (Brightspeed) and previous (Spectrum) ISPs have
         | nominally "supported" IPv6. Except ... not nationwide, there
         | are regional differences in how it's done and how well it
         | works. And nobody can tell me if my specific location is
         | supported or how to configure my equipment to use it.
         | 
         | On one hand, that gives me hope that we're getting closer to
         | near-universal ISP support. On the other hand, it's been like
         | this for so long I question if it'll ever improve.
        
         | zokier wrote:
         | Crusty enterprise networks are far bigger problem than retail
         | ISPs. This is clearly visible by the fact that you have clear
         | weekend peaks in e.g. Googles IPv6 adoption stats.
        
       | ranger_danger wrote:
       | Maybe in 20 years my local ISP monopoly will start to roll out
       | IPv6.
        
         | bbarnett wrote:
         | Mine rolled it out more than a decade ago, had nothing but
         | problems, shrugged, and removed it.
         | 
         | Sadly, I think they're more hesitant now.
        
       | throw0101d wrote:
       | Two days ago:
       | 
       | * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205515
        
         | p1mrx wrote:
         | Direct link to the list of IKEA products you can spell with an
         | IPv6 address: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39209844
        
       | ipshii wrote:
       | What! that's insane! if true
        
       | ramshanker wrote:
       | I hope we see a not-so-subtle jump in usage on google ipv6
       | tracker.
       | 
       | https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
       | 
       | Anecdote, my ISP gives us IPv6 but not my employer. We use the IT
       | equipment till the last breadth. I have seen, permanent table-fan
       | running towards Floor's network hub. I guess that one is NOT IPv6
       | ready. :D
        
         | wongarsu wrote:
         | I doubt it. Realistically the AWS charge mostly causes
         | companies to stop giving IPv4 addresses to servers that never
         | directly talk to customers. As a knock-on effect this will
         | cause tooling to become more IPv6 aware, and put pressure on
         | SaaS in infrastructure monitoring and dev tooling to be
         | reachable via IPv6 (for example this might cause github to
         | finally fix their IPv6 game because of higher customer demand).
         | 
         | Maybe companies use the same opportunity to make sure their
         | services also work via IPv6. But they won't stop offering their
         | services on IPv4, and AWS changes don't put meaningful pressure
         | on ISPs to roll out IPv6. If anything it will reduce the
         | pressure on the price of IPv4 addresses, making it more viable
         | for ISPs to hold out.
        
           | zinekeller wrote:
           | > will cause tooling to become more IPv6 aware
           | 
           | I doubt it, especially that there is an option of using
           | private/CGNAT ranges instead of adopting a whole new
           | protocol. Everyone who cares about IPv6 have already done
           | their part, and people who don't care about it will likely
           | use the lower-friction option, and between private IPv4
           | networks and IPv6 I bet that a lot of people will see private
           | IPv4 as a lower-friction option.
        
         | zamadatix wrote:
         | The tracker is for client connections to Google. To impact that
         | graph AWS customers would have to, en masse, decide the $1/m
         | charge is worth losing half their current users over and then
         | the users and ISPs would have to scramble for IPv6.
         | 
         | The more likely story is places using AWS pay 1$/m for a public
         | address and use private/IPv6 internally. I.e. an incremental
         | step, not a revolution in the chart.
        
           | the8472 wrote:
           | > losing half their current users
           | 
           | IPv6 adoption is not uniformly distributed. Some usersbases
           | might have higher penetration. But yeah, I doubt there are
           | many where it's high enough to be worth it.
        
       | ceejayoz wrote:
       | Maybe Amazon can start?
       | 
       | https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/appl...
       | 
       | > You can configure your Application Load Balancer so that
       | clients can communicate with the load balancer using IPv4
       | addresses only, or using both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
       | (dualstack).
       | 
       | I'd love to go IPv6 only. Amazon _won 't let me_, and charges for
       | the privilege.
       | 
       | Look at the list of "no"s on
       | https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ipv6-su....
        
         | vander_elst wrote:
         | Last time I checked GitHub was also an offender.
        
         | troupe wrote:
         | My guess is that going IPV6 only for load balancers would make
         | it break for enough people that AWS thinks it would reflect
         | poorly on their service.
        
           | lolinder wrote:
           | That seems unlikely given that the vast majority of users
           | have no clue what the underlying service provider is for the
           | web services they're using, and those who _do_ know are savvy
           | enough to understand the difference between an AWS issue and
           | a configuration issue.
        
             | troupe wrote:
             | Imagine if Cloudflare went to IPV6 only. Yes, Cloudflare's
             | customers should know what that means, but the end users
             | that are using the service may not be and if the error in
             | anyway says Cloudflare, then it gives Cloudflare a bad
             | reputation.
             | 
             | While AWS is a bit (just a bit) more removed from the end
             | user than Cloudflare, there is still the potential for it
             | not being good PR.
        
               | bluGill wrote:
               | Cloudflare couldn't dare of IPv6 only until a lot more of
               | the internet supports IPv6. They could however offer a
               | discount of some sort to customers that are IPv6 only.
               | That includes proxy your IPv6 only site to IPv4 (actually
               | they would probably not give a discount directly, but let
               | you apply discounts you get from your ISP)
        
               | lolinder wrote:
               | Cloudflare actually presents end users with an
               | authentication page on a regular basis. AWS is strictly
               | behind the scenes. The only time I've ever become aware
               | that a site is using AWS is when reading their
               | engineering blog or spelunking in the dev tools.
        
               | elwebmaster wrote:
               | These infinite verification prompts are the reason I no
               | longer consider Cloudflare as an option for business use
               | and would not recommend it to anyone. I know that they
               | are configurable by the admins but they give bad PR to
               | Cloudflare. I am not sure what this company was thinking
               | associating itself with such a terrible user experience.
        
           | LinuxBender wrote:
           | I agree and would first urge people to test IPv6 client
           | access using some lazy-loaded image that is IPv6 only on
           | their website. It should look like a normal resource so that
           | false-negatives are not introduced by NoScript or uBlock.
           | 
           | People can of course manually test here [1] from their homes,
           | schools, work place. I would wager most cellular data
           | networks would be fine. The impact would probably depend on
           | how a website is utilized. Stats on mobile vs. non-mobile
           | would probably be telling. The people on their cell should
           | test LTE vs Wifi and clear cache between tests.
           | 
           | [1] - https://test-ipv6.com/
        
           | wongarsu wrote:
           | But a load balancer doesn't have to be user-facing. It might
           | just be fronting an internal API or microservice
        
         | wongarsu wrote:
         | Why would they, now that IPv4 brings in $1B/year
        
           | pixl97 wrote:
           | Cable ISPs have been doing this for years... want a static IP
           | or multiple IPs? $$$.
           | 
           | Want IPv6...... please hold forever.
        
             | nfriedly wrote:
             | I'm on metronet, which is a new-ish fiber optic ISP.
             | They're exclusively IPv4 and they default everyone to CGNAT
             | unless you call and complain - in that case you get a
             | static IPv4 for free for a year and then $10/month after
             | that (although another phone call usually gets another free
             | year.)
             | 
             | I specifically asked for IPv6 and was told they don't offer
             | that.
        
               | ilinx wrote:
               | That's great to know. I'm literally watching them install
               | in my neighborhood as I type this.
        
               | nfriedly wrote:
               | To be fair to metronet, aside from that and some hiccups
               | during the initial install, I've been pretty happy with
               | the service. The speed is fantastic, and it's been fairly
               | reliable.
               | 
               | The price keeps slowly going up, but that seems to be par
               | for the course with ISPs.
        
               | RHSeeger wrote:
               | Admittedly, the time you know if a ISP is good or not
               | isn't reached _until_ there's a problem. Because it's all
               | about how they work with you to get it resolved.
        
               | tw04 wrote:
               | This isn't universally true. They've primarily expanded
               | by acquiring other companies, and a few regions do have
               | IPv6. Lansing, Michigan in particular which was
               | previously Lightspeed.
               | 
               | That being said, the CGNAT thing is just silly in 2023 -
               | give us IPv6.
        
               | smachiz wrote:
               | they're still going to have to CGNAT 65% of your traffic
               | that's IPv4 only.
        
               | p_l wrote:
               | At the very least they could use 4x6x4 instead of normal
               | CGNAT, and bring down the costs.
        
               | p1mrx wrote:
               | 65% is a lot better than 100%.
               | 
               | But the real number (at least on mobile networks) may be
               | closer to 20%:
               | https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/2018/state-of-
               | ipv6...
        
               | zokier wrote:
               | Thats also six year old data; a lot has happened since,
               | especially outside the US. For example european
               | connectivity rate has doubled, and the top 1000 websites
               | is close to 50% now which is also almost double that of
               | 2018.
        
               | themerone wrote:
               | I've heard of at least one isp that is IPv6 only and
               | tells customers to use whois to find someone to help them
               | with sites that don't work.
        
               | p1mrx wrote:
               | [citation needed]
        
               | aidenn0 wrote:
               | I've gotten a /64 delegation from my cable ISP for almost
               | a decade. There were some hiccups at first, but it's been
               | working for a while now, to the point where I recognize
               | issues with IPv4 as when my wife tells me "only Google
               | and Netflix work"
        
               | CorrectHorseBat wrote:
               | They should be giving you a /56 or a /48 though, since
               | you're not supposed to subnet a /64.
        
               | viraptor wrote:
               | This is now so common, I expect the common software to
               | adjust soon. You can still subnet below /64 with some
               | patching or a more complex config. Software will match
               | reality it exists in - we already did that for classless
               | ipv4 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-
               | Domain_Routi...
        
               | CorrectHorseBat wrote:
               | Why though? Classless ipv4 solves a real problem, handing
               | out /64's not
        
               | aidenn0 wrote:
               | I think I can reconfigure DHCPv6 for a /56 (IIRC I need
               | to talk to a person if I want a /48) but I only currently
               | have one network at home, so _shrug_.
        
               | emeril wrote:
               | I'm on Verizon FIOS - they rolled out IPv6 a couple years
               | back and it was so poorly rolled out and communicated
               | (i.e., lots of things/services were complete broken) that
               | I fully disabled IPv6 on my router and don't intend to
               | reenable it until I have to...
        
             | StressedDev wrote:
             | Comcast has supported IPv6 for approximately a decade.
        
             | bluGill wrote:
             | Weird, most cable ISPs that I know of have been IPv6. Last
             | I checked in the US (pre pandemic) there is more IPv6
             | nights and weekends than working hours by a lot because the
             | Cable ISPs and cell phone companies rolled out IPv6 long
             | ago, while companies mostly are behind. OF course you
             | didn't say what country you are in - different countries
             | have very different numbers.
        
             | bpye wrote:
             | Telus in Canada is a bit annoying. Residential connections
             | get dynamic IPv4 and not-quite-static IPv6 /56 - I had the
             | same prefix for about 6 months until some recent
             | maintenance changed it.
             | 
             | If you pay for a business connection you can get 1 or more
             | static IPv4 addresses, but then you get no IPv6
             | connectivity.
        
           | thimp wrote:
           | I reckon 20% of EC2 is NAT gateways with one instance behind
           | them.
        
             | szundi wrote:
             | Why would this make sense?
        
               | thimp wrote:
               | I've configured at least 3 VPCs in the last decade which
               | were exactly that.
               | 
               | Literally one instance with VPC service endpoints
               | deployed and an egress NAT gateway. Surprisingly common
               | when you have a random shitbox which sucks data up from
               | somewhere and doesn't fit within the constraints of a
               | Lambda or something. They mostly exist to tick the
               | compliance and architectural documents which are all
               | under AWS "best practices".
               | 
               | Note that I do not consider AWS "best practices" to be
               | best practices necessarily. In fact a lot of time they
               | are completely over-engineered against hypothetical
               | scenarios which if they did happen, fixing some EC2
               | integration shitbox would not even remotely be the first
               | problem you had to worry about.
               | 
               | But someone demands it and someone pays for it and Bezos
               | ain't complaining so meh!
        
         | richardw wrote:
         | What about the dark web? It's already not trying to be too
         | visible and I assume many participants would be happy to jump
         | through hoops.
         | 
         | Or something crypto. Pay to your IPv6 address, or nodes must be
         | IPv6.
         | 
         | Or social network.
         | 
         | Start with an edge case that gets insiders to change behaviour.
        
         | Hikikomori wrote:
         | They barely got dual stack working for the more important
         | services just recently, wouldn't expect ipv6 only for years.
        
         | belter wrote:
         | If they would, they could easily recover the money from the
         | data transfer they charge on the Load Balancer.
         | 
         | "Elastic Load Balancing pricing" -
         | https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/
        
         | p1mrx wrote:
         | It's rather brave of them to publish the list of "no"s. I
         | imagine that's helping to crack the whip on IPv6 support within
         | the company.
        
         | belter wrote:
         | Speaking of...
         | 
         | "AWS Free Tier now includes 750 hours of free Public IPv4
         | addresses, as charges for Public IPv4 begin"-
         | https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/02/aws-free-...
        
       | dark-star wrote:
       | Awesome move. It's about time!
       | 
       | This might give IPv6 the final push it needs to convince the last
       | few ISPs who are still stuck on IPv4-only
        
         | zanfr wrote:
         | there is no clear benefit to most users tho
        
           | mjhay wrote:
           | In the US, usually not - but the US is comparatively spoiled
           | for IPv4 blocks. It's pretty common in a lot of places for
           | ISP customers to share public-facing IPs. This causes all
           | sorts of issues with people being unfairly spam blacklisted,
           | etc.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT
        
             | nfriedly wrote:
             | Even my (US) ISP defaults everyone to CGNAT.
        
           | redserk wrote:
           | Households with multiple Nintendo Switch and _I think_ the
           | PS5 consoles (I may be mixing this up with Xbox) would
           | significantly benefit.
           | 
           | Some games assume there's only one console per public IP, and
           | expects ports NAT forwarded as such.
           | 
           | Giving each end-user an IPv6 prefix completely solves that
           | mess.
        
             | tsimionescu wrote:
             | Up until the games start limiting things to a single IPv6
             | prefix, of course.
        
           | Qwertious wrote:
           | It makes setting up a home server much easier, because you
           | can get infinite free static IPs.
           | 
           | That doesn't contradict that "most users" don't benefit,
           | though.
        
             | massysett wrote:
             | How is it any more static than v4? Network providers can
             | still provide dynamic addresses with v6.
        
           | bluGill wrote:
           | There is benefit to ISPs, and has many other ISPs and cell
           | companies have shown the world is ready and most people won't
           | even notice if you give them IPv6 - their computers will
           | notice and start using it.
        
       | xhkkffbf wrote:
       | At what point do these numbers start to be like a crypto
       | currency? But one with real utility?
        
         | bluGill wrote:
         | They already are, but it is a risky investment - the higher the
         | price goes the more people switch to IPv6 and thus the lower
         | the value goes. Eventually there will be a tipping point where
         | people realize they don't care about IPv4 and quickly the value
         | will go to zero.
        
         | lightweb wrote:
         | Check this out. IPV6 integrated with Bitcoin generated
         | addressing. Every packet gets a unique address. Security
         | implications are profound.
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.15842.pdf
        
       | mrweasel wrote:
       | This could also slow down IPv6 adoption. This is going to free up
       | a ton of IPv4 addresses, reducing the need for AWS to purchase
       | new ranges. I know of a few companies that started auditing their
       | public IPv4 usage on AWS after the original announcement.
       | 
       | Some AWS customers have released 80+% of their public IPv4
       | addresses. The alternative isn't IPv6, it's private addresses.
       | Many AWS customers have been slapping public IPs on EC2 instance
       | just because they could or because they didn't know any better.
        
         | zamadatix wrote:
         | Customers having to switch to private addressing still seems
         | like more pressure than customers having infinite free public
         | addresses was providing, not less.
         | 
         | I.e. address exhaustion pressure isn't only about the complete
         | inability to buy an IP it's about how much work you have to do
         | to use IPv4 addresses.
        
           | wongarsu wrote:
           | It depends on how you measure IPv6 adoption. Is it about your
           | ability as consumer to use only IPv6, or your ability to
           | offer a website reachable only via IPv6.
           | 
           | AWS charging for IPv4 will help with the former, because
           | companies now have more of a reason to care about IPv6. But
           | it might delay the latter, because fewer IPs wasted on
           | internal servers means less price pressure on useful IPv4 use
           | by ISPs, giving those that still hold out less financial
           | incentive to change anything.
        
             | kees99 wrote:
             | IMHO, best way to measure IPv6 adoption would be - what
             | percentage of your website's visitors are able to reach
             | your IPv6-only site.
             | 
             | That percentage should be well above 99% for a popular
             | website operator to even consider going IPv6-only; needless
             | to say, in most markets, this figure is way lower, with no
             | clear path to improving.
        
               | eastbound wrote:
               | It doesn't help that, if you enable IPv6 in Debian, the
               | network becomes extremely slow for many things. The
               | reason? If first tries to reach all domains with IPv6,
               | times out, then use IPv4. Of course that's because I
               | didn't successfully configure IPv6 with the network, but
               | on the other hand, IPv4 only was successful at first try.
        
             | patmorgan23 wrote:
             | But this is also AWS exerting price pressure on its
             | customers. This move is an increase in price pressure, not
             | a decrease.
             | 
             | If everything host on AWS becomes dual stack and gets first
             | class IPv6 support after this move, that's a win for IPv6.
             | 
             | The price for v4 address is going to bob up and down as
             | more networks and content providers adopt v6 and are able
             | to reduce their public v4 usage to just their edges.
             | 
             | There will definitely be a long tail of v4, especially in
             | the corporate world, but I think we'll get to 90-95% v6
             | capable within the next 5-10 year
        
         | sgjohnson wrote:
         | AWS owns about 7% of the entire public IPv4 allocation space.
         | There's no way this is going to slow down IPv6 adoption. Nobody
         | likes NAT, especially when it comes to servers.
        
         | jerf wrote:
         | "This is going to free up a ton of IPv4 addresses, reducing the
         | need for AWS to purchase new ranges."
         | 
         | Yup, this has been obvious for a while if you read the better
         | economic analyses. Charging for IPv4 doesn't on its own remove
         | it. It creates some sort of economic balance between the value
         | and scarcity of the IPv4 address space.
         | 
         | When you're trying to fit the entire world of 7 billion people
         | into 4 billion addresses, the space looks pretty scarce. But
         | assuming a roughly power law distribution of services and their
         | importance of being on IPv4, as you cut off the people with
         | lower-end needs, like, "my cell phone needs to communicate on
         | the internet so let's give it an IPv4 address", you _extremely
         | rapidly_ cut through orders of magnitude of the old uses.
         | 
         | That long tail of "Facebook is not willing to cut off even .01%
         | of its user base so it has IPv4 addresses to serve on" may take
         | a long time to get through, but we're well through getting huge
         | swathes of the other users off of it.
         | 
         | What kills IPv4 is in the far future when the expense of
         | maintaining it specially exceeds the benefits. Since
         | maintaining it is rather cheap, this is going to take a while.
         | But as IPv4 diminishes in importance, ironically, so does the
         | value of entirely eliminating it. When it is 1% of the traffic,
         | who will really be desperate to drop that to zero?
        
           | bluGill wrote:
           | Thing is if it is only 0.01% of users Facebook won't give up
           | on they can just do a few ipv4 server/address. Now Facebook
           | has severs around the world, but if it is only a few users
           | they just need two servers - and that is only for redundancy.
           | Now they have thousands (maybe even millions? I don't know)
           | of servers and they may as well give all the external facing
           | ones IPv4 addresses as most need that anyway and so the
           | hassle of maintaining IPv6 only servers isn't worth it.
           | 
           | And of course if you are in the 0.01% you will discover that
           | while Facebook and google won't give up on you many other
           | providers will as it just isn't worth the cost. By that time
           | the cost won't be IPv4 addresses - they will be again free -
           | it will be the cost of maintaining IPv4 on all the routers
           | and servers. (the routers mean IPv4 will cost more, but it
           | won't be for the address it will be for routing access)
        
           | sva_ wrote:
           | > entire world of 7 billion people
           | 
           | Should be more like 8bn now
        
           | marcus0x62 wrote:
           | > When it is 1% of the traffic, who will really be desperate
           | to drop that to zero?
           | 
           | The service providers who have to maintain IPv4 and IPv6
           | configurations in their networks.
        
           | zokier wrote:
           | I don't find it at all difficult to imagine that someone like
           | Google or Apple would sunset ipv4 when it reaches single
           | digit percentage. They know no ISP would risk losing
           | connectivity to them.
           | 
           | For example Apple has already been requiring that appstore
           | apps work in ipv6 only networks _since 2016_. They can just
           | keep tightening such rules until ipv4 dies.
           | 
           | It's naive to think that maintaining ipv4 (/dualstack)
           | networks is (and will remain) cheap at large global scale
           | like Google.
        
         | nemothekid wrote:
         | > _The alternative isn 't IPv6, it's private addresses._
         | 
         | I really wish more AWS services or workflows worked with
         | private addresses. Sometimes a service can be completely
         | internal but needs a public address to either talk to Dynamo or
         | install packages; but those endpoints aren't available via
         | private IP, even though they physically live in the same region
        
           | paulddraper wrote:
           | Why?
        
             | nemothekid wrote:
             | I really don't care about IPv6 or IPv4. In my neck of the
             | woods, 10.0.0.0/8 is more than I would ever need. Most
             | architectures I've seen only realistically need only a
             | handful of public IPs, that then are assigned to a load
             | balancer that does service discovery on internal services.
             | I don't think about IP addresses at all.
        
               | paulddraper wrote:
               | Yeah but then you have to futz around with NAT.
        
               | nemothekid wrote:
               | Today you have to futz around with NAT, but you wouldn't
               | have to if you simply never made any connections to the
               | public internet. And for many services that's completely
               | fine.
        
           | coredog64 wrote:
           | I believe the latest version of the VPC wizard defaults to
           | gateway endpoints for both S3 and DynamoDB.
           | 
           | If you're in a 6-only VPC/subnet, an egress only gateway will
           | allow you to grab packages from IPv6 enabled public data
           | sources.
        
         | kccqzy wrote:
         | Correct. I am convinced that the best way to speed up IPv6
         | adoption is to provide IPv6-only networking but with NAT64.
         | 
         | Historical evidence is on this: cell phone ISPs have started
         | doing this a long time ago and look at how high the IPv6
         | adoption is on mobile.
         | 
         | Also, an IPv6-only network removes the happy eyeballs algorithm
         | so any routing issues on the IPv6 internet won't be papered
         | over by the speed of the IPv4 internet, so there's more
         | incentive to fix that.
         | 
         | (If you are interested in doing this at home, the most up-to-
         | date documentation is a presentation from RIPE
         | https://ripe87.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/8-I...
         | that covers NAT64/DNS64/DHCP108/PREF64).
         | 
         | Of course everything I said above is conditioned on speeding up
         | IPv6 adoption as a goal. Unfortunately for many, IPv6 adoption
         | is not a goal at all, so nothing I said above applies to them.
        
           | ianburrell wrote:
           | Don't forget about MAP-T which does IPv4 NAT over IPv6. The
           | client is IPv4, the ISP is IPv6, and server is IPv4. This is
           | still CGNAT but IPv6 is provided. But means ISP uses IPv6
           | internally.
           | 
           | The problem for NAT64 in general use is that there is lots of
           | IPv4-only software. NAT64 is great for business networks
           | where control the software, but home users are going to try
           | to use their Xbox 360 or Windows game from the 90s.
        
       | zanfr wrote:
       | while I could set up v6 I just wont for a while... when I do I
       | expect things to be better documented
        
         | wongarsu wrote:
         | I've defaulted to setting up v6, but deactivating it once it
         | causes trouble. I don't want to actively sink time into it, but
         | in 95% it just works out of the box (or with obvious config
         | changes, like adding an IPv6 listening port and an AAAA DNS
         | entry), and in those cases I'm happy to let it stay until it
         | causes trouble.
         | 
         | In another 10 years it's probably worth putting more effort
         | into the other cases as well, but so far I'm happy with getting
         | 80% of the way there for 0.1% of the effort.
        
           | wharvle wrote:
           | Yeah, IPv6 is shut off on my Google Fiber router. Stuff on
           | the Internet breaks when it's on (last tested three or so
           | months back when they sent me a new router).
           | 
           | When we first got Fiber, years ago, Amazon's store was one of
           | the things that broke until I turned off IPv6. Wouldn't load
           | at all, on any device on our network.
           | 
           | Works fine for VPNs and such, but I don't talk to the
           | Internet with it, because my experience has been it's
           | terribly unreliable.
        
             | vel0city wrote:
             | I'm curious what breaks with IPv6 on. I've been running
             | IPv6 dual stack for over a decade at home and pretty much
             | never have any issues. I think I've run into a prefix
             | change get bugged on my router's announcements that
             | required a reboot, but that's like 2 times in the last 10+
             | years and I'm not 100% sure that was truly the issue. My
             | phone is pretty much always has an IPv6 address and pretty
             | much never has IP-related connectivity problems. I'm not
             | using Google Fiber's router though, so that could be the
             | complication.
        
               | wharvle wrote:
               | The typical behavior is that DNS returns an IPv6 address,
               | then whatever-it-is sits there until a timeout, because
               | it's simply not being routed. I've not investigated
               | further because turning off IPv6 fixes the problem and
               | breaks nothing (that I care about). Anything that only
               | returns an IPv4 address from DNS works either way.
               | 
               | My cellular connection supports IPv6, but testing sites
               | report it's misconfigured in a bunch of ways. I don't see
               | problems in practice, though. But on my home network,
               | it's turned off.
        
               | Dylan16807 wrote:
               | > because it's simply not being routed
               | 
               | Well if you don't actually have IPv6, and you're turning
               | off a broken ghost of IPv6, that's very reasonable.
               | 
               | But in that case it confuses people when you call that
               | "turning off IPv6".
        
               | wharvle wrote:
               | _Shrug_ Google's router thinks I have it. And it's on by
               | default.
        
               | vel0city wrote:
               | This is what I was thinking about with the prefix issue.
               | I've encountered this issue like twice and rebooting my
               | router ended up with a different prefix, so it seems more
               | like my router just didn't get the new prefix and thus
               | kept handing out the old prefix to everyone with SLAAC
               | and thus wouldn't get routed right.
        
       | j4yav wrote:
       | They should donate the billion to projects that accelerate the
       | transition.
        
         | bbarnett wrote:
         | Only when companies (who are for profit), and ISPs (who are for
         | profit) buy new hardware, and config it for ipv6, will change
         | come.
         | 
         | Projects aren't the real problem.
        
           | idatum wrote:
           | For my ISP, it's not just about the hardware, it's their
           | provisioning software that needed replacing. It has to be
           | simple for their support to understand how IPv6 is given to
           | customers.
        
           | patmorgan23 wrote:
           | IPv6 has been around for 30 years and well supported by
           | switching and routing vendors for 20. What hardware is out
           | there today that does not support v6?
        
       | nromiun wrote:
       | If anyone wants to use GitHub from their IPv6 only VMs I would
       | recommend a SSH reverse tunnel. It works like this:
       | https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/116191/give-server-...
        
         | zokier wrote:
         | You don't actually need ssh tunnel here though, you can just
         | connect directly to the proxy server?
        
           | nromiun wrote:
           | In this case the PC is the proxy, which sometimes does not
           | have a public IP address (behind ISP NAT).
        
           | p1mrx wrote:
           | Some sort of NAT64 is probably a better idea, because that
           | applies below the TLS layer.
           | 
           | When people complain about IPv6 and IPv4 being incompatible,
           | the fact that you can establish a cross-protocol TCP+TLS
           | session with just a NAT is a remarkable counterexample. It
           | could've been a lot worse.
        
             | zokier wrote:
             | Sure, there never was a shortage of different ipv4/ipv6
             | transition/interop mechanisms. Problem has been that many
             | of them haven't been all that great, and understanding the
             | use-cases, compromises, and tradeoffs between the options
             | can be very difficult, especially when vendors and
             | operators like to tout their own tech.
             | 
             | To this day I'm not sure what are the best options
             | available now for different scenarios.
             | 4rd/MAP-T/MAP-E/464XLAT/Dslite, nat64/siit/a+p, these
             | things are enough to get your head spinning
        
               | p1mrx wrote:
               | "Reality has a surprising amount of detail"
        
               | ianburrell wrote:
               | The transition mechanisms that need to worry about now
               | are NAT64, MAP-T, and XLAT. Only the first do you have to
               | worry about setting up unless you are ISP. The rest are
               | obsolete.
               | 
               | NAT64 is used for IPv6-only networks to talk to IPv4. It
               | puts the IPv4 address in the IPv6 address. The downside
               | is that doesn't work with old IPv4-only software.
               | 
               | XLAT is used on mobile phones, and does the translation
               | on the device. It only works for devices where translator
               | can be installed.
               | 
               | MAP-T can be used for IPv6 ISP to provide IPv4 access. It
               | is basically CGNAT but using IPv6 as stateless transport.
        
             | ianburrell wrote:
             | AWS NAT Gateways support NAT64/DNS64. I'm not sure if it is
             | on by default or have to enable it.
             | 
             | You have to pay for it, but paying for NAT Gateway for
             | IPv4.
        
         | nextaccountic wrote:
         | why isn't github accessible through ipv6 without a reverse
         | tunnel?
        
           | wmf wrote:
           | Extreme laziness.
        
       | yesimahuman wrote:
       | Hoping this lights a fire under other AWS wrappers like Heroku
       | and Vercel to support IPv6. Currently dealing with the fallout of
       | the Supabase IPv6 change and frustrated that two of my core
       | vendors still don't support it.
        
       | VoodooJuJu wrote:
       | >expected to bring $1B/year
       | 
       | Yes.
       | 
       | >and speed up IPv6
       | 
       | Fucking lol. It's still not enough of a financial hit for people
       | to want to deal with IPv6.
       | 
       | Should have just come up with a better protocol in the first
       | place. That's what really would have stimulated adoption.
        
         | Borg3 wrote:
         | Something like this? http://borg.uu3.net/~borg/?ipv6
        
           | sgjohnson wrote:
           | > keep ARP, ND wasn't a great idea after all
           | 
           | there's nothing wrong with ND and it addresses several
           | security vulnerabilities, namely ARP cache poisoning. But the
           | real reason why ARP was removed is because it's a layering
           | violation.
           | 
           | > NAT support (because it's everywhere these days)
           | 
           | nothing at all is stopping you from doing NAT on IPv6, except
           | for the fact that everyone hates NAT, even people that
           | pretend that they like it.
           | 
           | > Correct DHCP support (SLAAC wasn't a great idea after all)
           | 
           | SLAAC is a great thing. Also, DHCPv6 also exists, which
           | allows you to do exactly what DHCP lets you do. Android
           | doesn't support DHCPv6, but that's not IPv6s fault.
           | 
           | - IPv6->IPv4 interop (one way)
           | 
           | There's no such thing as one-way communication if we're
           | talking TCP. Besides, it's still fundamentally impossible if
           | the other end has no idea what to do with the source address.
        
             | betaby wrote:
             | DHCPv6 doesn't support dhcpv6 forwarding though like dhcpv4
             | does. One can't forward dhcpv6 request over multiple ipv6
             | hops, only hop-by-hop forwarding supported to my knowledge.
        
             | Borg3 wrote:
             | There are several IPv6 -> IPv4 interops (bridges) developed
             | already. All of them appeard due to slow IPv6 adoption.
             | Some of them are: NAT64, XLAT6, DS-Lite.
             | 
             | Never heard about ND tables overflows? They fixed one
             | thing, broken another. ARP poisoning is mostly fixed
             | problem.
             | 
             | I like NAT myself. Im dualhomed (el-cheapo), using policy
             | routing and NAT. Everything works like a charm. I cant
             | imagine such setup w/o NAT actually.
             | 
             | SLAAC might be great thing for you, but not for others.
             | This is why IPv6 is such a failure. Instead of creating
             | simple protocol to meet middle ground, they slapped
             | together annoying techs for specific cases like IoT. Great
             | job.
        
               | sgjohnson wrote:
               | > I cant imagine such setup w/o NAT actually.
               | 
               | If you had a /24 of v4, you easily could.
               | 
               | > SLAAC might be great thing for you, but not for others.
               | 
               | [citation needed]
        
               | Borg3 wrote:
               | Haha, right.. eBGP session to home customer.. Other
               | solution would be /24 + VPS provider + eBGP session with
               | them. Kinda overkill for me.
        
         | icedchai wrote:
         | If you know IPv4 networking, you can learn v6 in a day or two.
         | It's just not that complicated. Some aspects, like no need for
         | NAT, easier subnet calculations, etc. make V6 simpler to
         | deploy. What's wrong with it? What would make it "better"? I've
         | been running V6 at home for over 15 years (first on a tunnel,
         | then native.) In a professional context, I am still running
         | into people afraid to turn it on.
        
       | nimbius wrote:
       | imo the 'static' ip issue with ipv6 has not been solved by
       | providers. cable internet cabals are content to use dhcpv6 to
       | dole prefixes out, but these are the same providers whos DNS
       | servers typically post four-digit latency figures for DNS queries
       | so the idea they they are to be the ones to solve DHCPv4's
       | scalability issues remains laughable. just _try_ getting a
       | statically assigned prefix from their  "business" or "corporate"
       | offerings. wont happen.
       | 
       | SLAAC is the best hope so far, but regular hosted customers do
       | not understand that slaac is calculated by mac, so theyll need
       | education to ensure immutable architectures dont crash and burn
       | on lift-and-shift redeployments. either that, or enjoy hardcoding
       | ip's in your prefix to the boxes.
       | 
       | then theres networking. most corporate network engineering that
       | would handle ingress or peer traffic to clouds (especially azure
       | tenants) treat ipv6 as a cursory knowledge...something theyre
       | aware of in theory but have never taken it upon themselves to
       | practice. i predict AWS will send a lot of them scrambling for
       | mouldy ccna texts and taking down the hybrid cloud at least twice
       | a month until the basics sink in.
       | 
       | and finally, firewall and security devices. There are a lot of
       | vendors that have gotten a free pass to grandstand about how
       | stellar their IPv6 support is, only to send customers to phone
       | tree purgatory trying to find support for a device that either
       | cant route between local, unique local, special purpose ranges,
       | ::1, or even the special discard ranges for things like DDoS
       | protection. frankly its not an AWS issue (yet) but the only guise
       | ive seen handle this competently are...cloudflare.
        
       | cdelsolar wrote:
       | I still have no idea what IPv6 actually is or how it works, or
       | how a router can be IPv4 or IPv6 only, etc.
        
         | p1mrx wrote:
         | By what method did you learn what IPv4 is and how it works?
        
       | szundi wrote:
       | How nice they are to move the world forward, thanks
        
       | dpedu wrote:
       | Could anybody recommend a book for learning IPv6? I know there
       | are plenty out there, but what are the best, HN's
       | recommendations? I get the general concepts and I use it on
       | personal systems but I've spent too long just skirting by. It's
       | time for a deep dive. I think the best type of book to learn from
       | would have a mix of textbook knowledge and practical
       | examples/demos.
        
         | unethical_ban wrote:
         | The CCENT and CCNA certification books have chapters dedicated
         | to IPv6 and I think they do a good job talking about it.
         | 
         | edit: Some little tips about it.
         | 
         | * The smallest subnet should be /64. Anyone making a smaller
         | subnet than that is doing it wrong (looking at you, _every ISP
         | that assigns me an address_ )
         | 
         | * Subnets should be created in four-bit chunks. You should
         | always make /64, /60, /56, etc. for readability. That's because
         | 4 bits make up one hex character in the address.
         | 
         | * If you want to have private (non-internet-routable) IPv6
         | space, create a ULA. https://www.unique-local-ipv6.com/ Imagine
         | never having to worry about address overlap with VPNs or
         | routing between two internal networks.
        
       | exabrial wrote:
       | What benefit does ipv6 bring to the every day user?
        
         | matja wrote:
         | What's an "every day user"?
         | 
         | Maybe some P2P applications will magically start working or
         | have lower startup time because of no need for STUN/TURN/ICE
         | for NAT traversal.
        
         | aquaticsunset wrote:
         | Their devices continue to work when a scarce resource is no
         | longer plentiful. The every day user doesn't need to care, but
         | the people working on the stuff the every day user has need to
         | care.
        
       | jgalt212 wrote:
       | AWS fees are $3.6/mo. Not to defend AWS, but Verizon business
       | wanted $20/mo for a static public IP address.
        
       | linux_devil wrote:
       | Aws Kinesis and other services dont even support IPV6 to start
       | with , how are they speeding up IPV6 adoption
        
       | ckdarby wrote:
       | My hope was they'd charge for the IPs, but would drop the cost of
       | NATs.
       | 
       | I can't believe the cost of NATs! If you're running in triple AZs
       | that is 3 nats you're paying for.
        
         | simpsond wrote:
         | You can technically route through one if you can tolerate that.
         | But I agree. They just got more expensive.
        
       | krupan wrote:
       | People, IPv6 was introduced 28 years ago! For some reason it is
       | not catching on and probably never will. Let's try something
       | else.
       | 
       | EDIT: my take on IPv6 is this. In the early 2000's I wanted to
       | run a web server at home. Figuring out how to make my $10
       | gateway/router do port forwarding was hard. IPv6 sounded like the
       | right solution. Now... none of those problems really exist
        
         | jazzyjackson wrote:
         | 64 bits is too many bits. honestly could have slapped a
         | country+area code in front and gained a few hundred IPv4
         | addresses per person.
        
           | lajamerr wrote:
           | 128 bits*
        
         | hcarvalhoalves wrote:
         | > For some reason it is not catching on and probably never
         | will.
         | 
         | If a major player is making $1B out of it "not catching on", I
         | agree it never will.
        
       | jsz0 wrote:
       | IPv6 has been such a wild ride. About 7 years ago there was a big
       | IPv4 depletion scare when ARIN made it harder to obtain IPv4. I
       | did a bunch of dual stack deployments for customers around this
       | time. In subsequent years quite a few of them ended up paying us
       | to come back in and un-deploy IPv6 as their network engineers or
       | often 'the IT guy' neglected to maintain firewall rules and
       | access-lists leading to major security issues. I can't really
       | think of any other vital technology like this that has rotted on
       | the vine and had so many false starts.
        
       | jrockway wrote:
       | I am not sure if these incentives help IPv6 adoption. Nobody can
       | turn off IPv4 today; there is always a long tail of people with
       | broken IPv6 stacks. Since IPv4 continues to work, I'm not even
       | sure it's worth setting up IPv6 so that someday you can switch
       | IPv4 off; do work that gets you customers today, switch off of
       | IPv4 when it becomes a crisis. I think the best incentive would
       | be a high price on IPv4-only, but if you do the work to support
       | dual-stack, then that fee is waived. That way, there is savings
       | for doing the technical work today, and you pave the way for a
       | brighter future.
       | 
       | Personally, I think I'd pay the fee to not be dual stack these
       | days. Everything in your infrastructure has to now check two
       | things. Your website uptime checker has to probe via both IPv4
       | and IPv6. You have to maintain two sets of firewall rules. You
       | have to remember to "ping -6 example.com" in addition to "ping
       | example.com" when checking connectivity. I don't think it's worth
       | the effort, and I say that as someone who first made their
       | website available over IPv6 in like 2008. (I moved providers in
       | 2020 and the new one didn't have IPv6. It made me sad. But now
       | it's just one less thing to worry about.)
        
         | viraptor wrote:
         | > Nobody can turn off IPv4 today
         | 
         | ... for all services.
         | 
         | There are internal servers talking to other servers which don't
         | need ipv4. There's zerotier that gives you a private IPv6
         | network regardless of your network capabilities. The only part
         | that actually still requires ipv4 is the general public user.
        
           | tsimionescu wrote:
           | Sure, but internal servers talking to internal servers can
           | also do so on private IPv4s, which are free.
           | 
           | So, no need to bother with IPv6 and its myriad complexities
           | just for that.
        
             | viraptor wrote:
             | Not always. Sometimes you talk between different providers,
             | or to private endpoints on other services. Or its simpler
             | use IPv6 between two networks rather than keep a global
             | list of ipv4 ranges to make sure they don't collide.
        
               | tsimionescu wrote:
               | Using IPv6 also comes along with many other complexities.
               | If you already have a working IPv4 solution, working
               | around costly public IPv4 addresses is likely much easier
               | than trying to switch to IPv6 and having to adapt every
               | part of your infrastructure to the many surprising ways
               | it's different.
        
       | CaffeinatedDev wrote:
       | Amazon itself is a large user of AWS, is this taken into account
       | when surmising the $1B/year figure?
        
       | beoberha wrote:
       | I wonder how much of the IPv4 space is used for infra that could
       | just be privately addressed with some reworking of network
       | topology.
       | 
       | I find these articles on HN focus much more heavily on consumer
       | use of IPv4 for simple things like web browsing. But not a lot of
       | consideration is paid to massive corporate systems and API
       | surfaces. Would be interesting to know.
        
       | josteink wrote:
       | Sorry for being off-topic, but the utterly lacking IPv6
       | availability (still!) annoys me so much.
       | 
       | I know IPv6. I can route it. I can setup networks with it. And my
       | ISP supports it, but just kinda. For some arcane reason, it only
       | supports it for some types of transport.
       | 
       | Got Cable/Coax internet? Great! You get IPv6 and a subnet too!
       | 
       | Got Fiber to the Home? You get IPv4. And no subnet.
       | 
       | I'm in the latter segment, and I just don't get it.
       | 
       | The ISP in question is Telia, a pretty big ISP in Scandinavia. If
       | someone in the know-how could tell me at least _why_ they 're
       | doing things like this, that might offer some mental consolation.
        
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       (page generated 2024-02-02 23:01 UTC)