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Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

IPv6 adoption is just the traffic shift from desktop to mobile. IPv6 kinda makes sense in mobile because it solves a problem of needing multiple addresses per person (phone, tablet, gaming device, etc) and the whole stack is maintained by two entities (the phone OS manufacturer and the carrier). It probably would have worked even better if it was far less complex and only solved the problem that was needed.

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> IPv6 adoption is just the traffic shift from desktop to mobile.

There are entire ISPs (in the US) that are IPv6-only for CPE because IPv4 is unavailable and they have to use expensive CG-NAT boxes to deal with IPv4:

* https://community.roku.com/t5/Features-settings-updates/It-s...

*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624

Meanwhile India was 80% IPv6 as of a few months ago:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32798003

The fact that the US and EU just happened to get a bunch of addresses first doesn't mean the rest of the world has the same options available.

More addresses are needed if everyone on the planet is to be able to connect.

Residential broadband often has it too. The laggards are corporate networks and cloud where IT is ultra conservative and “if it’s not broke don’t fix it.”

The only thing that will make corporate environments change is if something they need starts requiring it, and not a second before.

Cloud is slowly getting it. Slowly. GitHub still doesn’t have it though, which makes pure v6 nodes annoying for a lot of use cases.

I work for a federal space where IPv6 native is a mandate. As someone who's working on k8s, we often have to build and patch everything ourselves to support that mandate. Want to pull a helm chart from a github repo? Gotta either dual stack the node or run a reverse proxy to make that happen.

I'd love to be at a point where everyone just dual stacked everything so that one day we can flip off the IPv4 switch.

Try NAT64. It'll let v6-only clients reach v4-only websites.

Interesting. I'll take a look! Thanks!

I think major failure of Kubernetes was not being IPv6-only from the beginning. Its model of every pod having own address works much better with IPv6 where addresses are cheap. With IPv4, it needs complicated overlay networks. The cluster boundary would also make a good place for NAT64 proxy.

Kubernetes didn't get IPv6 support until later, and it sounds like it isn't reliable yet.

> I think major failure of Kubernetes was

Heh. Kubernetes as a whole was a failed project at Google that got open sourced.

I was under the impression that Google simply latched onto the project? Doesn't Google still use borg to this day?

Corporate networks are not lagging for being ultra conservative; they lag, because the moment they start thinking about any change, their vendors start pushing all manners of products and licenses on them, that they insist are absolutely necessary for that change and it won't work without it. Sharks feel the blood in the water, and they want to make whatever is possible on it.

So in the end you are looking both at capex, increased opex and for what? You have ipv6? Congratulation, now you go to your C-level bosses and explain to them why it was worth it. Good luck.

Residential broadband has been getting v6 too. It saves money and provides added functionalityfor the same reasons as on mobile. And academic/research networks got there first long time ago. Corporate envirments seem the biggest holdout.

IPv6 only solves a problem if you don't understand the problem itself! Just because people have five devices doesn't mean they need 65,000 * 5 internet addresses ... there is an endpoint for every port and each device needs only a handful of ports if not only one! Each user can certainly get by with five ports on five shared ipv4 addresses.

As I said before IPv6 will never happen fully because it solves a non-problem very expensively - by assuming the whole world is 64-bit workstations!

That works fine for outbound connections but doesn't work for inbound connections. You can't have two devices listening for inbound connections on the same IP address.

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