This is wonderful news. Now people will be incentivized to set up IPv6, which means the documentation for setting up IPv6 will improve, which means more people will set up IPv6 by default, which eventually means everyone uses IPv6 and static IPs become free.
I don’t see how it will incentivize ISPs to add IPv6 support. I would love to have IPv6 but my ISP doesn’t care (and I can’t switch ISPs).
The only chance it will happen is if both things happen:
Websites stop being accessible thru IPv4 on a significant scale.
People blame ISPs for that instead of website operators.
Because your suggestion means that AWS customers will spend more money to have IPv4 and, for some mysterious reason, would spend engineering effort to set up IPv6 on top of that. Doubling their costs for what exactly?
Now, if AWS announced that they will stop allocating public IPv4 addresses by 2030, that would certainly get my ISP moving. But even that would not fulfill both parts of my test – the blame would fall on AWS.
For now, I only see a prospect of shared/SNI hosting like GH pages, Netlify, or the good ol’ LAMP hosting being more attractive.
My ISP (centurylink) supports ipv6, but it is almost worse than if they didn’t! I think they implemented some transitory version (6rd. also over PPPoE!) and seem to have never updated it since (eg. they consider it “job done”?). With what seems to be the proliferation of buggy dhcpv6 and prefix delegation, weird issues with ipv6 auto-address selection[1], getting a stable ipv6 address on an internal network seems nearly impossible. I’ve been tempted to try NAT66 ffs!
[1]: you were originally supposed to be able to use multiple ipv6 networks on the same segment (eg. a GUA/public-routable/globally-unique and a ULA/site-local), and have address selection pick the site-local when it is relevant (via a source address selection algorithm), and the GUA otherwise. I don’t think I ever saw it work right! I think these days site-local addresses are even considered “deprecated”.
I used to be IPv6 zealot 10+ years ago. Today I am resigned to the fact that IPv4 will be around forever.
About 10 years ago, my ISP (a former monopoly that is notorious for putting any kind of infrastructure investment off until not doing it will lose them a lot of customers) operated equipment on their backbones that dropped packets that weren’t well-formed IPv4 packets and broke IPv6 even for other ISPs buying transit from them. Now, with their consumer router, every machine on my network has IPv6 connectivity automatically and my browser connects to a surprising number of things with IPv6 without any issues.
I suspect IPv4 will be like old Android releases: people will track the number of customers still using it and eventually decide that it isn’t worth the cost to keep supporting. Once a few companies make that decision it will give cover to others wanting to do that same.
I agree and hope that this is what will happen. Especially since cloud providers seemingly being one of the major providers for machines without IPv6 per default.
However, I feel a bit like they are basically too cheap. Given how expensive AWS is in first place I feel like it’s more like a way to increase costs for Amazon rather than expecting a huge push for IPv6.
At $44/yr I don’t see this being a big issue for anyone who spends any significant amount of money on AWS. Maybe it will move the needle on IPv6 adoption a small amount, but I just don’t see it making a big difference. I hope I’m wrong.
At $44/yr I don’t see this being a big issue for anyone who spends any significant amount of money on AWS.
That may be true, but I know a lot of folks on the lower end of things that this will be a significant change for. One thing I do is help non-profits get hosted as cheaply (and easily: I’d rather them NOT have to keep me on speed dial) as possible. Lightsail has been good for that. At $3.50 per month for Lightsail, the cost of the IP will double the cost of everything they are hosting. I completely agree that (usually) won’t break the bank, but a 100% increase in costs is still a 100% increase in costs.
The exception to the above is non-profits I’ve helped keep a web presence after that have gone under so that their work is not lost. In that case, there are some very specific “free-tier” providers that can be used to keep something going for just the cost of a domain name. AWS will no longer be part of that. I say that acknowledging this is a very niche use case.
Now if only the solution to at least 10% of my networking problems weren’t “disable IPv6 at a system-wide and network-wide level to make sure nothing ever tries to use it, anywhere ever”, I could get on board with this.
Ignoring all my other problems and complaints with IPv6 (notably, that reciting an IP address for v6 is a disaster), “it doesn’t even work 10%+ of the time” is a showstopper that makes me laugh at this in the “please stop trying to make Fetch happen” way .
Then again - freeing up IPv4 addresses in the server space will reduce the need for me to care about IPv6 at all on the client side, as the server sides can NAT their way through the mess transparently to me, so maybe in the spirit of this article 1 and a few others I’ve read that talk about IPv6 being a flop, this is actually a good thing. Shrug.
Hetzner already does this (IPv6 is free, IPv4 is 60 cents per month). You can avoid paying by proxying through cloudflare (tho you need to explicitly allow SSH through cloudflare somewhere).
Nice. I also use one of their ARM VPSs. They’re just a good host, imo: cheap; good dashboard; no bullshit with introductory prices, complicated bundles or lock-in.
I feel this has been a long time coming. The market for IPv4 addresses varies a lot, but from a search I just did, the value of an IP is something like $0.40/mo. Regardless of the exact number, that will be a big cost component of a small service that might only bring a couple dollars a month (like a micro instance, or idle ELB). AWS has done a lot to enable private VPC endpoints, and other advanced “private networking” features, so now whole services can be provided with maybe 1-2 public IPs on a frontend load balancer.
This is wonderful news. Now people will be incentivized to set up IPv6, which means the documentation for setting up IPv6 will improve, which means more people will set up IPv6 by default, which eventually means everyone uses IPv6 and static IPs become free.
I don’t see how it will incentivize ISPs to add IPv6 support. I would love to have IPv6 but my ISP doesn’t care (and I can’t switch ISPs).
The only chance it will happen is if both things happen:
Because your suggestion means that AWS customers will spend more money to have IPv4 and, for some mysterious reason, would spend engineering effort to set up IPv6 on top of that. Doubling their costs for what exactly?
Now, if AWS announced that they will stop allocating public IPv4 addresses by 2030, that would certainly get my ISP moving. But even that would not fulfill both parts of my test – the blame would fall on AWS.
For now, I only see a prospect of shared/SNI hosting like GH pages, Netlify, or the good ol’ LAMP hosting being more attractive.
There are government programs to pressure ISPs to add IPv6 support. Depending on the country, of course.
What if the Google front page would bicker about your ISP being bad when you access via ipv4?
My ISP (centurylink) supports ipv6, but it is almost worse than if they didn’t! I think they implemented some transitory version (6rd. also over PPPoE!) and seem to have never updated it since (eg. they consider it “job done”?). With what seems to be the proliferation of buggy dhcpv6 and prefix delegation, weird issues with ipv6 auto-address selection[1], getting a stable ipv6 address on an internal network seems nearly impossible. I’ve been tempted to try NAT66 ffs!
[1]: you were originally supposed to be able to use multiple ipv6 networks on the same segment (eg. a GUA/public-routable/globally-unique and a ULA/site-local), and have address selection pick the site-local when it is relevant (via a source address selection algorithm), and the GUA otherwise. I don’t think I ever saw it work right! I think these days site-local addresses are even considered “deprecated”.
There is long way from “paid/expensive IPv4 addresses” to “IPv6-only services that would force people to get IPv6 connectivity”.
I used to be IPv6 zealot 10+ years ago. Today I am resigned to the fact that IPv4 will be around forever.
About 10 years ago, my ISP (a former monopoly that is notorious for putting any kind of infrastructure investment off until not doing it will lose them a lot of customers) operated equipment on their backbones that dropped packets that weren’t well-formed IPv4 packets and broke IPv6 even for other ISPs buying transit from them. Now, with their consumer router, every machine on my network has IPv6 connectivity automatically and my browser connects to a surprising number of things with IPv6 without any issues.
I suspect IPv4 will be like old Android releases: people will track the number of customers still using it and eventually decide that it isn’t worth the cost to keep supporting. Once a few companies make that decision it will give cover to others wanting to do that same.
I agree and hope that this is what will happen. Especially since cloud providers seemingly being one of the major providers for machines without IPv6 per default.
However, I feel a bit like they are basically too cheap. Given how expensive AWS is in first place I feel like it’s more like a way to increase costs for Amazon rather than expecting a huge push for IPv6.
At $44/yr I don’t see this being a big issue for anyone who spends any significant amount of money on AWS. Maybe it will move the needle on IPv6 adoption a small amount, but I just don’t see it making a big difference. I hope I’m wrong.
That may be true, but I know a lot of folks on the lower end of things that this will be a significant change for. One thing I do is help non-profits get hosted as cheaply (and easily: I’d rather them NOT have to keep me on speed dial) as possible. Lightsail has been good for that. At $3.50 per month for Lightsail, the cost of the IP will double the cost of everything they are hosting. I completely agree that (usually) won’t break the bank, but a 100% increase in costs is still a 100% increase in costs.
The exception to the above is non-profits I’ve helped keep a web presence after that have gone under so that their work is not lost. In that case, there are some very specific “free-tier” providers that can be used to keep something going for just the cost of a domain name. AWS will no longer be part of that. I say that acknowledging this is a very niche use case.
Now if only the solution to at least 10% of my networking problems weren’t “disable IPv6 at a system-wide and network-wide level to make sure nothing ever tries to use it, anywhere ever”, I could get on board with this.
Ignoring all my other problems and complaints with IPv6 (notably, that reciting an IP address for v6 is a disaster), “it doesn’t even work 10%+ of the time” is a showstopper that makes me laugh at this in the “please stop trying to make Fetch happen” way .
Then again - freeing up IPv4 addresses in the server space will reduce the need for me to care about IPv6 at all on the client side, as the server sides can NAT their way through the mess transparently to me, so maybe in the spirit of this article 1 and a few others I’ve read that talk about IPv6 being a flop, this is actually a good thing. Shrug.
Hetzner already does this (IPv6 is free, IPv4 is 60 cents per month). You can avoid paying by proxying through cloudflare (tho you need to explicitly allow SSH through cloudflare somewhere).
I do that. Luckily my ISP supports ipv6, so I can SSH directly.
I’m a huge fan of Hetzner since they’ve added ARM VPSes. I don’t need to cross-compile from my MacBook :)
Nice. I also use one of their ARM VPSs. They’re just a good host, imo: cheap; good dashboard; no bullshit with introductory prices, complicated bundles or lock-in.
sighs and my ISP still doesn’t support ipv6 ;_;
I feel this has been a long time coming. The market for IPv4 addresses varies a lot, but from a search I just did, the value of an IP is something like $0.40/mo. Regardless of the exact number, that will be a big cost component of a small service that might only bring a couple dollars a month (like a micro instance, or idle ELB). AWS has done a lot to enable private VPC endpoints, and other advanced “private networking” features, so now whole services can be provided with maybe 1-2 public IPs on a frontend load balancer.