AWS claims 'monumental step forward' with optional IPv6-only networks AWS customers can now create IPv6-only virtual private cloud (VPC) networks, with the company claiming it is a "monumental step forward" towards the enablement of IPv6 on its cloud. Systems running dual network stacks (supporting both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses) are commonplace, but IPv6-only is less common. The new feature …
My employer made the transition to IPv6 after a merger due to massive collisions in RFC 1918 address space. The only IPv4 addresses we have remaining are on the external side of our public facing load-balancers and a few firewalls we use for IPSec tunnels. All of our external DNS, mail, proxy, public VPN, and web servers are IPv6-only. We use a mix of IPv6, IPv4-to-6, and IPv6-to-4 virtual servers to make it all work. I wouldn't be surprised if we're still using address translation a decade from now, but I would be surprised if IPv4 traffic isn't the minority by then.
As for AWS now offering IPv6-only networks, I wonder if this will pave the way for them to start charging extra for public IPv4 addressing. Blocks of IPv4 addresses aren't cheap.
You have to wonder with AWS's success and need to have services in each region, then how many IPv4 address blocks do they actually have ?
I'm happy to see the move here, since in many cases there is nothing stopping people moving to IPv6 other than the fear of the unknown and not doing what they did yesterday. Layer 3 changed, that's all. In many cases, client side is already enabled for IPv6 as the telco's have all enabled their customer base to use it.
They publish them - here https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json
How did they get so many? They buy them of companies who don't need them.
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2017/05/mit-goes-on-ipv4-selling-spree/
http://www.southgatearc.org/news/2020/october/sale-of-amateur-radio-amprnet-tcp-ip-addresses.htm#.YZ6b-9DP02g
I was looking for a hosted box earlier this year (as a personal VPN endpoint) and the cheaper offers were all IPv6 only systems, you pay extra if you want IPv4. Thankfully my ISP offers IPv6 at home, so it's not an inconvenience for me.
Hardly surprising that some of the big players would start the push to IPv6, there can't be that much usable IPv4 space left for them...!
Argh, why do words like "quintillion" even exist? I doubt there are many people who know what named numbers larger than billion or trillion actually represent (and then there is the whole short scale versus long scale issue where people speaking different languages can't even mutually agree on what these do mean).
When you get to numbers that ludicrously big (or small), it's surely easier (and just as meaningful/meaningless) just to refer to them as 10^x or 2^y as appropriate, for all the "comprehensible" meaning they have?
Don't see the issue, TBH.
Most people know that words ending in "illion", for numbers, means "really big", and enough people understand "quint" to figure out its bigger than "trillion" and "quadrillion".
Frankly 10^18 would be just as unfathomable for the many people you refer to. All it saves is a bit of typing.
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