AWS Elastic IP architecture

Mon Jun 1 05:19:00 UTC 2015

On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 10:46:02PM -0400, Christopher Morrow wrote:
> So... ok. What does it mean, for a customer of a cloud service, to be
> ipv6 enabled?

IPv6 feature-parity with IPv4.

My must-haves, sorted in order of importance (most to least):

> o Is it most important to be able to terminate ipv6 connections (or
> datagrams) on a VM service for the public to use?
> 
> o Is it most important to be able to address ever VM you create with
> an ipv6 address?
> 
> o Is it most important to be able to talk to backend services (perhaps
> at your prem) over ipv6?

If, by "backend services", you mean things like RDS, S3, etc, this is in the
right place.

> o Is it most important that administrative interfaces to the VM
> systems (either REST/etc interfaces for managing vms or 'ssh'/etc) be
> ipv6 reachable?
> 
> I don't see, especially if the vm networking is unique to each
> customer, that 'ipv6 address on vm' is hugely important as a
> first/important goal. I DO see that landing publicly available
> services on an ipv6 endpoint is super helpful.

Being able to address VMs over IPv6 (and have VMs talk to the outside world
over IPv6) is *really* useful.  Takes away the need to NAT anything.

> Would AWS (or any other cloud provider that's not currently up on the
> v6 bandwagon) enabling a loadbalanced ipv6 vip for your public service
> (perhaps not just http/s services even?) be enough to relieve some of
> the pressure on other parties and move the ball forward meaningfully
> enough for the cloud providers and their customers?

No.  I'm currently building an infrastructure which is entirely v6-native
internally; the only parts which are IPv4 are public-facing incoming service
endpoints, and outgoing connections to other parts of the Internet, which
are proxied.  Everything else is talking amongst themselves entirely over
IPv6.

- Matt

-- 
"After years of studying math and encountering surprising and
counterintuitive results, I came to accept that math is always reasonable,
by my intuition of what is reasonably is not always reasonable."
		-- Steve VanDevender, ASR