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That's the point. It's crazy that instead of getting IPv6 working in AWS, Amazon chose to build a NAT gateway service instead.

The forward thinking way to deal with IPv4 shortages would be for Amazon to support IPv6 end to end, and offer IPv4 connectivity via ELB or a NAT64 Gateway so that the non-IPv6 internet can reach your servers.

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A relative few of the biggest elephant customers of theirs are deploying IPv6 or even have it on a roadmap. There is a gigantic amount of money that can't be ignored by catering to these lumbering giants of Faustian bureaucracy that will be multiple decades behind current technologies and continue to fall even further behind despite any "cloud transformations" that they spend a small country's GDP on. This is a potentially dangerous path for AWS as they need engineers to work on both up to date technology and other engineers on outdated, obsolete legacy technologies that few engineers would prefer to work on. The good news about outdated technology should be that every competent engineer should understand something about why it's obsolete in some respect, but the truth is that few engineers on even HN understand the shortcomings of, say, COBOL and Fortran 77 over Java 7 and C# 5.0.

I don't think it's that crazy. Switching to IPv6 is painful. It's a fine standard, and better than IPv4 in most every way, ignoring transaction costs. But IPv4 + NAT persists because it's a smoother path - the same reason why HTML 5 won out against XHTML 2.0.

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