Re: AWS Elastic IP architecture

[Lee Howard <Lee () asgard org>]

On 6/1/15, 1:49 PM, "Matthew Kaufman" <matthew () matthew at> wrote:

> On 6/1/2015 12:06 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
> > ... Here¹s the thingŠ In order to land IPv6 services without IPv6
> > support on the VM, you¹re creating an environment where...
>
> Let's hypothetically say that it is much easier for the cloud provider
> if they provide just a single choice within their network, but allow
> both v4 and v6 access from the outside via a translator (to whichever
> one isn't native internally).
>
> Would you rather have:
> 1) An all-IPv6 network inside, so the hosts can all talk to each other
> over IPv6 without using (potentially overlapping copies of) RFC1918
> space... but where very little of the open-source software you build
> your services on works at all, because it either doesn't support IPv6 or
> they put some IPv6 support in but it is always lagging behind and the
> bugs don't get fixed in a timely manner. Or,
>
> 2) An all-IPv4 network inside, with the annoying (but well-known) use of
> RFC1918 IPv4 space and all your software stacks just work as they always
> have, only now the fraction of users who have IPv6 can reach them over
> IPv6 if they so choose (despite the connectivity often being worse than
> the IPv4 path) and the 2 people who are on IPv6-only networks can reach
> your services too.

³fraction² is nearly 1/5 in the U.S., and growing fast:
https://www.vyncke.org/ipv6status/project.php
I don¹t know your source for ³often being worse,² but I have several
sources saying, ³lower latency.² (see NANOG60, IPv6 Performance Panel, and
see Facebook¹s numbers from World IPv6 Congress).

> Until all of the common stacks that people build upon, including
> distributed databases, cache layers, web accelerators, etc. all work
> *better* when the native environment is IPv6, everyone will be choosing
> #2.

For certain values of ³everyone.²

> And both #1 and #2 are cheaper and easier to manage that full dual-stack
> to every single host (because you pay all the cost of supporting v6
> everywhere with none of the savings of not having to deal with the
> ever-increasing complexity of continuing to use v4)

I agree with that.

Lee


> Matthew Kaufman