The industry is switching to IPv6, just slowly. Google's report of the fraction of users accessing its services on IPv6 steadily rises by a few percent a year. Right now it's at about 45%, so it'll be the majority in about two years.
Adoption rate is currently increasing roughly linearly at a rate of about 5 percentage points every 12-18 months. Also note that there is a clear weekday/weekend pattern, with weekdays about 3-4 percentage points lower than weekends.
Very little progress has actually been made to move the bulk of stuff using v4 addresses over to v6. AWS v6 only instances have only been around for 20 months or so?
I don't know how to quantify "very little progress", but my home ISP (Verizon FiOS in NYC) got IPv6 relatively recently (maybe a year or two ago).
Anyway, don't most people connect to WiFi while using their handheld devices at home anyway?
a) According to [0], AWS has provided IPv6 addressing to EC2 instances since 2016.
> IPv6 support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) has been available along with IPv6 support for several other services since 2016.
Refer to the 2016 blog post at [1], which says (among other things)
> By default, every IPv6 address is public and internet-routable. For customers requiring a private subnet on their IPv6-enabled VPCs, we are introducing a new resource within the VPC called the Egress-only Internet Gateway, which can be setup to allow one-way access to Internet resources.
b) I don't get the "This migration only counts if we can support only IPv6 and shut off IPv4" obsession. I see no reason to shut off IPv4 within our lifetimes. I expect the distant future will be providing end-users with a globally-routable IPv6 prefix and a CGNATted-to-hell-and-back IPv4 address for reaching out to those sites that may still be using v4 only.
[0] <https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/aws-enables-us-fed...>
[1] <https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/12/announcin...>
Yes, but that isn't what we are talking about. 2022 is when they added native IPv6 support, prior to that it was just a fancy NAT like translation.
Are you sure about that? The relevant docs from 2019 (the Wayback Machine doesn't have anything earlier) sure make it seem like you're getting globally-reachable IPv6 addresses:
From [0]:
> To complete this exercise, do the following: ...
> * Launch an Amazon EC2 instance into your subnet, and associate an IPv6 address with your instance during launch. An IPv6 address is globally unique, and allows your instance to communicate with the Internet.
Yes, the last bit of that doesn't automatically mean that your instance is globally-reachable. Read on.
From [1]:
> IPv6 addresses are globally unique, and therefore reachable over the Internet. You can control whether instances are reachable via their IPv6 addresses by controlling the routing for your subnet, or by using security group and network ACL rules. For more information, see Security.
From the "Inbound" table of the "Recommended Rules for Scenario 1" section of [2]:
> | 170 | IPv6 address range of your home network | TCP | 22 | ALLOW | Allows inbound SSH traffic from your home network (over the Internet gateway). |
Am I missing some part of the docs where they talk about how there was some fancy NAT-like translation box that made it so that these weren't globally-reachable IP addresses? Was AWS just lying in their docs?
[0] <https://web.archive.org/web/20190131164146/https://docs.aws....>
[1] <https://web.archive.org/web/20190801182729/https://docs.aws....>
[2] <https://web.archive.org/web/20191021190354/https://docs.aws....>
AWS was never built with IPv6 in mind and it is mostly glued on. As of right now 88% of AWS services are IPv4 only: https://awsipv6.neveragain.de/ (uncheck the Hide IPv4 only box)
I mean, on the one hand, I'm taking AWS at their word. If they wrote subtle lies into their docs, one can hardly be blamed for failing to understand the truth of the situation.
But on the other hand, if
* My VM has its globally-reachable IPv6 address assigned to it
* Can transmit packets to globally-reachable IPv6 hosts using that address
* Can receive unsolicited packets from globally-reachable IPv6 hosts on that address
whatever hairs you're splitting seem to be a distinction without a difference? Based on my professional experience, "wacky SDN stuff" is par for the course in the Public Clown.
Or, to put it another way, the customer of an ISP couldn't care less about how exactly that ISP delivers them globally-reachable IPv6 service, just so long as it behaves exactly like you'd expect globally-reachable IPv6 service to behave. Maybe between the customer's edge router and the Internet the ISP has some wacky tunnel that runs only over IPv4, and breaks IPv6 service if you turn it off... the customer doesn't give any shits, just so long as the IPv6 service works correctly and reliably.
> As of right now 88% of AWS services are IPv4 only...
This to me is an entirely irrelevant statistic. My expectation is that end-user systems aren't going to be IPv6-only for a very, very long time, but are going to nearly all have globally-reachable IPv6 addresses relatively soon.
So, one should (for the foreseeable future) expect global bidirectional reachability for end-user systems on IPv6, and typical NAT "initiated by end-user request" reachability for end-user systems on IPv4.
I'd like to see rules that force ipv6 support, and then to prevent idiot network admins from disabling ipv6 locally because they're too lazy to learn how it works, make some websites v6 only. Start with essential government websites and move on to laws forcing more and more private websites to be v6 only to force people to maintain its functionality in their networks.
The market has been given its chance to move for DECADES and we're not NEARLY at the approximately 100% deployment that we need. It's time that we fix this mess.
A true chicken and egg problem.
At this rate, we’ll be struggling with IP-shortages, CGNAT and other fun things for decades to come. And it’s all so unnecessary.