News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses. Parent comment

Re:AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses by viraptor on Saturday August 14, 2021 @03:33AM (#28178806)
The funny thing is social media and streaming is already there:

    facebook.com has IPv6 address 2a03:2880:f119:8083:face:b00c:0:25de
    instagram.com has IPv6 address 2406:da00:ff00::23ae:4dc1
    snapchat.com has IPv6 address 2001:4860:4802:36::15
    netflix.com has IPv6 address 2600:1f14:62a:de82:822d:a423:9e4c:da8d
    youtube.com has IPv6 address 2404:6800:4006:810::200e
The holdouts are somewhere else. Imagine if cloudflare and cloudfront defaulted to enabling ipv6 - I expect the jump in worldwide ipv6 traffic would be massive. On the other hand the missing services are very tech oriented:

    github.com has no AAAA record
Once traffic can default to ipv6, we'll see ipv4 slowly dying, but the defaults really matter.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses by jgrahamc on Saturday August 14, 2021 @03:52AM (#28178904)
We do default IPv6 on. https://blog.cloudflare.com/always-on-ipv6/

And the chart in that blog shows the dent we made.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses by viraptor on Saturday August 14, 2021 @04:30AM (#28179058)
My bad, should've been more clear - yes, it's the default in some places. What I meant is actually treating ipv6 as first class everywhere. For example:

This guide doesn't even mention AAAA records: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/dns-records/

API examples are ipv4 unless the option takes ipv6 only: https://api.cloudflare.com/#dns-records-for-a-zone-update-dn...

Your terraform examples use ipv4 only: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/cloudflare/cloudflar... https://registry.terraform.io/providers/cloudflare/cloudflar...

And many others.

In other words, I expect steering people to do ipv6, then maybe ipv4 as well rather than the opposite would give the internet as a whole another big jump in ipv6 usage.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses by indigodaddy on Saturday August 14, 2021 @04:37AM (#28179092)
This will show my lack of ipv6 knowledge but I’ll ask anyway. Say I have an endpoint service somewhere listening only on ipv6.

Let’s take any sort of CDN out of the equation for simplicity. Can I use Cloudflare DNS for the service, such that anyone using ipv6 will connect directly to my service, of course— but can CF do some magic ipv4->ipv6 translation/bridge sort of thing, so that someone on ipv4-only will also be able to connect to my ipv6-only service?

I’d imagine the answer is hopefully yes and perhaps this is trivial stuff these days, but anyway I’m thinking of setting up a blog and might go ipv6 only with it..

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses by p1mrx on Saturday August 14, 2021 @11:35AM (#28181449)
Cloudflare makes a website dual-stack from the user's perspective, regardless of whether the server is IPv4-only or IPv6-only.

Typically, both the A and AAAA records point to the same Cloudflare proxy, because serving IPv4 and IPv6 via different infrastructure requires a lot of care to avoid subtle brokenness.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses by jon-wood on Saturday August 14, 2021 @05:26AM (#28179321)
You should be able to advertise your ipv6 endpoint in the AAAA record, going direct to the origin, while make the A records pointers to Cloudflare which can then proxy back to your v6-only origin servers.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses by indigodaddy on Saturday August 14, 2021 @02:28PM (#28182885)
Awesome, thanks for the answers all! Sounds simple enough!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses by cortesoft on Saturday August 14, 2021 @01:10PM (#28182247)
It wouldn't be magic.... the AAAA record for DNS would point to your server, and the A record would point to cloudflare.

Of course, it is up to the client, then, to decide which address to use. Not all clients default to v6 even if it is available.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses by glogla on Saturday August 14, 2021 @04:36AM (#28179085)
Nice, good work!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses by est31 on Saturday August 14, 2021 @04:15AM (#28178996)
About 16% to 23% of the Alexa 500 top sites have ipv6 support [0]. There hasn't been much of a change since august 2018 (17% to 21%) [1], or Oct 2016 (19% to 21%) [2]. 5 years is a long time in tech.

Meanwhile on the user side support has tripled from about 11% in 2016 to 33% recently [3].

I guess when you run a scalable web service, you need comparatively few publicly available ip addresses, and everyone has ipv4 anyways, while when you run an ISP, you need way more ip addresses. So the problem is way more pronounced for ISPs than the service providers. I guess the number of deployments with carrier grade NAT without ipv6 support is quite low.

[0]: http://www.delong.com/ipv6_alexa500.html

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20180826104925/http://www.delong....

[2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20161019011050/http://www.delong....

[3]: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AWS adds an extra 5.5M IPv4 addresses by anthropodie on Saturday August 14, 2021 @08:18AM (#28180054)
I was suggesting disabling Ipv4 within a month. Merely enabling Ipv6 isn't going to help.
[ Parent | on HN ]