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Comment by daurnimator | Hacker News Reader

IMO the major thing holding back IPv6 on the web is amazon. A huge proportion of services are hosted on AWS, and the lack of IPv6 addressing of instances cannot be forgiven.

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Amazon seem to be slowly getting there: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/10/ipv6-supp...

Wow, how did I miss this, CloudFront getting IPv6 support is huge!

"Getting?" I set up some CloudFront instances (or whatever they call them) a month ago and it had an IPv6 checkbox (which was unchecked by default, for some reason), but it seems to have been working fine ever since.

Yeah the announcement linked is from a month ago

They also support HTTP/2 now, which is pretty sweet.

ELBs support ipv6 as well

Only EC2-Classic ELBs do, which is only available to users who signed up for AWS before Dec 2013 (and doesn't support all the new VPC goodness)

The good news is that Amazon has been slowly rolling out IPv6 support across various AWS services (ex. S3, CloudFront). Once they support IPv6 on EC2, though, that will be the big breakthrough!

Not to mention Route 53, which can serve AAAA records, but still has no IPv6 nameservers.

It should now: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/10/amazon-ro...

ns-1887.awsdns-43.co.uk. 60 IN AAAA 2600:9000:5307:5f00::1

I'd say ISPs to start with. In the UK, BT still hasn't rolled out IPv6. Neither has vodafone.

Also I have servers in colocation with two datacenters, and for both I had to ask to the support to get an IPv6 range. We are very far from IPv6 becoming a standard feature.

It's time to switch HN to be IPv6 only forum, so 100% of HN'ers will be on IPv6 almost instantly. ;-)

> I'd say ISPs to start with. In the UK, BT still hasn't rolled out IPv6.

BT have at least partially rolled out support, as I have a v6 allocation on a BT broadband service.

I have read I can get it by upgrading to the very latest version of BT Home Hub (I am using 5). I ordered it yesterday. But my current Home Hub 5 is compatible, and I still don't have IPv6.

It looks like you would have got support on your existing device soon. A recent BT presentation says:

"[IPv6 support] Home Hubs 4 and 5 support from early 2017"

http://www.ipv6.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/UKIPv6Coun...

Actually I just received my new router and I now have IPv6!

That varies strongly by country[0]. My home ISP for example does DS-Lite and last week their AFTR was overloaded. So ipv4 was almost unusable while v6 worked fine. So temporarily I was already living in a post-v4 world.

[0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

SKY have recently rolled out IPv6 suuport to nearly all customers: https://corporate.sky.com/media-centre/news-page/2016/sky-co...

I use AAISP as my ISP and they have been providing IPv6 for a very long time: http://aa.net.uk/kb-broadband-ipv6.html

Amazon and github are the two major offenders.

https://ipv6wallofshame.com/

Baidu, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit are also major players who could make a huge difference.

The worst part about reddit in that case is that they use cloudflare which could be a 1 click update to ipv6. Previously they have stated that internal systems (spam, court orders, reporting) are holding them back from the change.

Still plausible, e.g. if their spam filters, court order handling and reporting expect to see IPv4 client addresses in their input and/or databases.

Cloudflare have a workaround for that too! https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/202494830-P...

You know, Cloudflare gets a lot of shit around here for being a centralizing entity in a decentralized Internet (sometimes justifiably), but they've done a hell of a lot to push forward needed changes in the Internet infrastructure. Often at little benefit to themselves.

Here's our motivation: https://blog.cloudflare.com/evenly-distributed-future/

That is a concise, interesting read topped off by some Gibson quotes. Thanks.

That site correctly lists apple.com as not supporting IPv6. The funny thing is that www.apple.com does support it.

Same with microsoft.com.

How is this the case?

Both Microsoft and Apple's www sites use Akamai's CDN, via a cname to a CNAME to something in akamaiedge.net, which support ipv6. The apex record of a domain (that is, the root record, microsoft.com or apple.com) cannot be a CNAME, it can only have an A, NS, MX or TXT record. A records make dynamic infrastructure hard, because they require API coordination between your DNS provider and your CDN. So Microsoft and apple host their own apex domain records via A records to static IPs in their own IP blocks, and have these servers issue a permanent http redirect to www.

With poor adoption rate of IPv6 persists in China, half of those listed (taobao, tmall, baidu, hao123, qq, youku, sina, weibo, etc.) just won't change in near future.

I am visiting China. It seems impossible to get an IPv6 address from either China Telecom (the ASN lacks IPv6 peering) or a datacentdr within China. Sending traffic to a VM in South Korea has similarly had the issue where I cannot find any VMs with IPv6 support, although most have terrible latencies.

I don't understand; APNIC ran out of ipv4 addresses ages ago. How do they...internet?

I think IPv4 addresses can be bought for cheaper than the cost to transition to IPv6.

I work for one of the companies on that wall of shame. I wonder to what extent it has the reverse of the intended effect. "Oh so not even Amazon, Twitter or GitHub gives a crap about IPv6? Why should we?".

It seems to have worked for python 3.

I kinda doubt that the site had a real influence on that.

Oh so not even Amazon, Twitter or GitHub gives a crap about IPv6? Why should we?

If this is really what they're thinking, then they have no pride in their work and will never be the best at what they do. I suspect most of the engineers working for Amazon, Twitter, and GitHub are well aware that they're lagging in ipv6, and are very intent on catching up.

Those are just one site each though. GitHub and Amazon are many.

Also, I am not sure if googleadservices.com should be on that list. Leaving advertising on IPv4 to die might be for the best. ;)

apple.com isn't but redirects to www.apple.com which is IPv6 enabled (akamai)

At a cursory glance, it seems that Google or Google-owned sites make up a majority of the IPv6-enabled sites. Seems to me the numbers would be a lot lower without Google's work.

The list also has a ton less green when you consider that most of the sites are just the google search page with different TLDs.

https://ripe73.ripe.net/archives/video/1539/ tells a different story.

as fastly goes, so goes github

IPv6 and a return to end-to-end addressing isn't really aligned with the AWS style of proprietary platform lock-in.

This makes no sense. AWS can give you IPv4 elastic IPs, which provide end-to-end addressing on IPv4. IPv6 will be no different in this regard.

"End-to-end addressing" is typically an end user issue, where end users use NAT. In the early days of the internet, nobody used NAT.

AWS encourages you to use VPCs for service-internal addressing. Yes, you can rent "elastic IPs", but in the AWS mindset they are special and to be used only for NATing Internet endpoints to your services. It's based on end-to-end addressing being special and a scarce resource. This is compatible with the traditional corporate intranet style of thinking, but it's also in the opposite of internet end-to-end addressing and they are in no hurry to change it.

ipv6 has a provision for locally routable addresses, because yes publicly routable addresses should be special. They should just also be free.

Link-local addresses are not routable and are not meant for application use, they're just for low level things like neighbour discovery and router advertisements (analogous to IPv4 ARP/DHCP).

There's also ULA that can be used for non-internet connected networks and some other special scenarios, but it would be a bad idea (and against recommended practice) to use them to port your RFC1918 addressing to IPv6.

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