Learn how to enable IPv6 for your cloud infrastructure

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Notes

Don't miss the blog post Getting started with IPv6 on AWS, the written version of this podcast episode.

Before you think about designing your IPv6 network, you should enable IPv6 alongside IPv4 on endpoints accessed by end-users. Around 30% of Internet traffic is already IPv6 traffic. The IPv6 deployment progress is mainly driven by mobile devices and varies heavily between countries. The following AWS services support IPv6: Route 53, CloudFront, internet-facing ALB, S3, and IoT Core.

There is no IPv6-only VPC on AWS. A VPC is always IPv4 enabled, but you can optionally enable IPv6 (dual-stack). When you do so, AWS assigns a /56 block of IPv6 Global Unicast Addresses (GUA) to your VPC - you can bring your own block as well. A GUA is like a public IPv4 address. You can assign each subnet in your VPC a /64 sub-block. There is no VPC/subnet size planing anymore!

Summary

IPv6 is coming. At some point in time, you have to start your journey towards IPv6. For now, I recommend enabling IPv6 for the endpoints that are used by your end-users.

There is not much benefit in enabling IPv6 in your VPC yet. The only exception is if you want IPv6 support for your ALB. As a workaround, you can front the IPv4 ALB with CloudFront to offer IPv6 to your end-users.

Learn more

I recommend a re:Invent talk from 2017: IPv6 in the Cloud: Protocol and AWS Service Overview (NET202). Besides that, I read IPv6 Essentials from Silvia Hagen (O'Reilly), which goes into the details (far beyond what you need to get IPv6 working on AWS).

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