The\u00a0adoption of IPv6 has been increasing<\/a>, but there have been a few areas where IPv6 has had difficulty gaining traction.\u00a0 One area where IPv6 hasn\u2019t been widely implemented is within\u00a0corporate enterprise<\/a>\u00a0internal networks and another is\u00a0within Cloud Service Provider (CSP) infrastructure<\/a>.\u00a0 For many years,\u00a0Amazon Web Services<\/a>\u00a0(AWS),\u00a0Google Compute Engine<\/a>\u00a0(GCE),\u00a0Microsoft Azure<\/a>,\u00a0VMware vCloud Air<\/a>, and\u00a0Salesforce<\/a>\u00a0have had either limited or no IPv6 capability.<\/p>\n Thus, the web services that rely on these public cloud services have been relegated to being IPv4-only sites.\u00a0 The organizations who are using these cloud providers for their public web-based applications have been unable to take advantage of the\u00a0performance benefits of IPv6<\/a>\u00a0that other IPv6-enabled platforms enjoy.\u00a0 In other words, the IPv6 deployment delays of the CSPs has delayed other downstream organizations from deploying IPv6.<\/p>\n Historically, there have not been many cloud providers who have embraced IPv6 but there have been some shining stars and rays of hope.\u00a0\u00a0John Vail\u2019s 2012 RMv6TF IPv6 Summit presentation<\/a>\u00a0and his\u00a0Nephos6 sponsored whitepaper<\/a>\u00a0showed which cloud providers were early adopters of IPv6.<\/p>\n Among those cloud providers who have embraced IPv6 include:\u00a0Bluelock<\/a>,\u00a0Brightbox<\/a>,\u00a0DigitalOcean<\/a>,\u00a0OVH<\/a>, and\u00a0Rackspace<\/a>.\u00a0 Other auxiliary cloud-based services like\u00a0Ping Identity<\/a>\u00a0are now starting to support IPv6.<\/p>\n Also, when it comes to building a private cloud infrastructure,\u00a0OpenStack<\/a>\u00a0has supported IPv6 for several years now.\u00a0 Also, software container technologies like\u00a0Docker<\/a>\u00a0have had IPv6 for years now and there are significant\u00a0benefits when using containers with IPv6-enabled networking<\/a>.<\/p>\n AWS has been diligently working on building out more IPv6 capabilities and now AWS is offering more IPv6-capable services.<\/p>\n In all fairness, AWS has had\u00a0IPv6 support for their Elastic Load Balancing<\/a>\u00a0(ELB) service for several years.\u00a0 The Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service distributes application traffic across multiple AWS virtual servers providing for increased performance, service elasticity,\u00a0added security<\/a>, and fault tolerance.\u00a0 You can create an\u00a0IPv6 VIP in the configuration of the ELB service<\/a>, but the real-servers (AWS\u00a0Elastic Compute Cloud<\/a>\u00a0(EC2)) instances are IPv4-only.\u00a0 This functionality would allow an AWS public web application that uses an Internet Gateway (IGW) to be reachable by IPv6-enabled clients.\u00a0 This is a similar approach to organizations who have used an\u00a0IPv6-enabled Server Load Balancer<\/a>\u00a0(SLB)\/Application Delivery Controller (ADC) reverse proxy function.<\/p>\n The\u00a0AWS Internet of Things<\/a>\u00a0(IoT) service has also\u00a0supported IPv6<\/a>\u00a0for a couple of years now.\u00a0 The AWS IoT service allows for application interactions with IoT devices.\u00a0 IoT has been a driver for IPv6 and some even say that there can be \u201cno IoT without IPv6<\/a>\u201d.\u00a0 Now you can use AWS to facilitate\u00a0MQ Telemetry Transport<\/a>\u00a0(MQTT) client interactions with the AWS IoT service using IPv6.<\/p>\n AWS\u00a0Simple Storage Service<\/a>\u00a0(S3) is an Internet-reachable durable object file storage service available through a web interface.\u00a0 A few months ago, in August of 2016, AWS announced\u00a0IPv6 support for Amazon S3<\/a>.\u00a0 Now, if you store files in S3 and your bucket and\u00a0Identity and Access Management<\/a>\u00a0(IAM) policies allow it, you can reach your files over IPv6 transport.\u00a0 To reach your S3 bucket over IPv6, you would simply refer to the URL using the \u201cdualstack<\/a>\u201d keyword as shown below.<\/p>\n A couple of months ago, in October of 2016,\u00a0AWS announced IPv6 capabilities for three related Internet edge services<\/a>: CloudFront, WAF, and S3 transfer acceleration.\u00a0\u00a0CloudFront<\/a>\u00a0is AWS\u2019s own CDN service that provides for Internet caching of web application contents for improved performance.\u00a0 AWS also offers a\u00a0Web Application Firewall<\/a>\u00a0(WAF) service for adding security to vulnerable web front-ends.\u00a0 The AWS\u00a0S3 transfer acceleration<\/a>\u00a0provides better file transfer performance levering the caching functionality of CloudFront\u2019s distributed edge locations. \u00a0To enable CloudFront for IPv6, you must check the box in the service settings through the\u00a0AWS Management Console<\/a>.\u00a0 IPv6 addresses will now appear in the\u00a0X-Froward-For<\/a>\u00a0HTTP header field capturing the source IP address for client connections.\u00a0 The AWS customer logs then must take this into consideration and be aware that a client can be reaching your CloudFront web content over IPv6.<\/p>\n AWS\u2019s Route53 service is their highly scalable and reliable DNS web service.\u00a0 Up until 2 months ago, it was an IPv4-only service, but\u00a0now it is IPv6-capable<\/a>.\u00a0 The Route53 service can now perform DNS resolutions over IPv6 transport and can contain AAAA records and IPv6 PTR records.<\/p>\n There were many exciting AWS announcements made at their annual\u00a0re:Invent conference<\/a>\u00a0held in Las Vegas, NV November 27th<\/sup>\u00a0through December 1st<\/sup>.\u00a0 One of the most exciting to the IPv6 community is that AWS now has\u00a0IPv6 support for EC2 instances in Virtual Private Clouds<\/a>\u00a0(VPCs).\u00a0\u00a0VPCs<\/a>\u00a0are AWS\u2019s virtual networking service that connects\u00a0EC2<\/a>\u00a0compute instances to subnets and can connect to various gateways for external connectivity.<\/p>\n Previously, VPCs did not support IPv6 and prevented customers from using IPv6 and connecting to the IPv6 Internet.\u00a0 VPCs also facilitate connectivity to and from AWS using\u00a0Internet Gateways<\/a>\u00a0(IGWs) or using you own private network.\u00a0 VPCs can now have IPv6 routes and\u00a0Network Access Control Lists<\/a>\u00a0(NACLs) as well as\u00a0security groups<\/a>\u00a0are now IPv6-capable.\u00a0 AWS\u00a0VPC Peering<\/a>\u00a0is also IPv6 capable and\u00a0VPC Flow Logs<\/a>\u00a0can gather information about IPv6 network traffic.\u00a0 IPv6-enabled VPCs allow your internal EC2 instances to use DHCPv6 to obtain their IPv6 address and to reach the Internet via a default gateway route.\u00a0 IPv6 is supported over\u00a0Direct Connect<\/a>, but IPv6 is not yet supported for\u00a0Virtual Private Gateway<\/a>\u00a0(VGW) VPN connections.<\/p>\n Since IPv6 does not need a NAT function, the global IPv6 addresses used for your VPC can traverse gateways without translation, therefore, there is no need for elastic IPv6 addresses.\u00a0 AWS has also introduced an\u00a0Egress-Only Internet Gateway<\/a>\u00a0(EIGW) that statefully controls Internet reachability for your VPC.\u00a0 The EIGW prevents unsolicited IPv6 inbound connections for private VPC connectivity.<\/p>\n Now that you can configure native IPv6 service for VPCs, you can have your EC2 instances connected to your own VPCs and you will get a \/56 IPv6 prefix from AWS\u2019s global IPv6 address block.\u00a0 The IPv6 address allocated to your VPC will vary based on the region you are operating in.\u00a0 Today this IPv6 VPC capability is only offered within the\u00a0US-East-2<\/a>\u00a0(Ohio, US) region.\u00a0 Hopefully this IPv6 VPC capability will be coming soon to other commercial AWS regions and U.S.\u00a0GovCloud<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you are curious, you can see which\u00a0IPv6 prefixes<\/a>\u00a0are being advertised from AWS\u2019s\u00a0ASN 16509<\/a>.\u00a0 You will quickly notice that they are extensively disaggregating their IPv6 addresses across their regions.\u00a0 (Could this create issues for the Internet as a whole? Perhaps:\u00a0Smokey Bear<\/a>\u00a0recently reminded us \u201cOnly You Can Prevent IPv6 Prefix Disaggregation<\/a>\u201d.)<\/p>\n You are also encouraged to watch this quick session recording titled \u201cAWS re:Invent 2016: NEW LAUNCH IPv6 in the Cloud: Protocol and AWS Service Overview (NET204)<\/a>\u201d.\u00a0 IPv6 proponents always love a good IPv4 to IPv6 address space analogy and the ladybug analogy is a good one.\u00a0 If you are already familiar with IPv6 fundamentals, you can just jump to 10:37 in the video where the conversation changes to how AWS services use IPv6.<\/p>\n Another more-detailed technical session on AWS IPv6 capabilities you will want to watch is this YouTube video recording for the session titled \u201cAWS re:Invent 2016: NEW LAUNCH IPv6 in the Cloud: Virtual Private Cloud Deep Dive (NET307)<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n Amazon Web Services<\/a>\u00a0(AWS) has become one of the most dominant\u00a0Infrastructure as a Service<\/a>\u00a0(IaaS) public cloud service providers.\u00a0 AWS has a strong\u00a0set of ecosystem partners<\/a>\u00a0and a thriving\u00a0AWS Marketplace<\/a>.\u00a0 You can even buy\u00a0Infoblox NIOS<\/a>\u00a0DNS and\u00a0IPAM<\/a>\u00a0systems through the\u00a0AWS Marketplace<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0run it in your AWS environment<\/a>.\u00a0 Even though Infoblox has supported IPv6 for many years, if the cloud provider you are using was not IPv6 capable, then the IPv6 functionality in NIOS would be diminished.\u00a0 If your AWS virtual networks are not yet IPv6-enabled, then your Infoblox instance will only function over IPv4 transport.\u00a0 In this situation, however, the Infoblox NIOS system could return AAAA DNS record responses over IPv4 transport.\u00a0 But now that AWS has IPv6 support for VPCs, your Infoblox NIOS instances could be connected to those dual-protocol VPCs, then your Infoblox system will easily support your dual-protocol architecture.<\/p>\n Amazon Web Services should be commended for putting forth substantial effort to IPv6-enable their services.\u00a0 Their customers should now leverage these capabilities to enable their public web applications and make sure that they are reachable by all the IPv6-capable clients.\u00a0 Hopefully sometime soon, all AWS services will be dual-protocol capable. \u00a0At that point, there will be complete\u00a0functional parity<\/a>\u00a0and all AWS services will use both IP versions.\u00a0 The current AWS offering is dual-protocol, but eventually, AWS will make their platform functional in an IPv6-only configuration.\u00a0 We can anticipate that AWS\u2019s movement toward IPv6 will help inspire other cloud providers.\u00a0 There are signs that the larger public CSPs are starting to embrace IPv6.\u00a0 For example, now\u00a0Microsoft Azure has support for IPv6 on VMs<\/a>.\u00a0 We can expect more cloud providers to adopt IPv6 in the coming year which will result in even higher Alexa top sites gaining IPv6 benefits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" IPv6-Capable Cloud Infrastructure Services The\u00a0adoption of IPv6 has been increasing, but there have been a few areas where IPv6 has had difficulty gaining traction.\u00a0 One area where IPv6 hasn\u2019t been widely implemented is within\u00a0corporate enterprise\u00a0internal networks and another is\u00a0within Cloud Service Provider (CSP) infrastructure.\u00a0 For many years,\u00a0Amazon Web Services\u00a0(AWS),\u00a0Google Compute Engine\u00a0(GCE),\u00a0Microsoft Azure,\u00a0VMware vCloud Air, and\u00a0Salesforce\u00a0have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":321,"featured_media":847,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[41,30,16,51,38,52],"class_list":{"0":"post-843","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ipv6-coe","8":"tag-cloud","9":"tag-dns","10":"tag-infoblox","11":"tag-ipam","12":"tag-ipv6","13":"tag-nios","14":"entry"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRecent AWS IPv6 Announcements<\/h2>\n
\n
AWS and Infoblox<\/h2>\n
Summary<\/h2>\n