IPv6

Bringing scale to your applications with IPv6

Why IPv6?

IPv6 usage is growing every year and becoming the default in many new network configurations. Being an IPv6 leader gives you experience to manage and deliver applications on modern networks. AWS allows you to design and deploy a global environment that leverages end-to-end IPv6 connectivity. You can host applications in dual stack and IPv6-only virtual networking environments and provide connectivity over IPv6 across Amazon VPCs and to and from the internet. We have supported IPv6 on AWS since 2011, and as of 2021 have IPv6-only capabilities like IPv6-only subnets and EC2 instances, NAT gateways that support IPv6 to IPv4 translation, Elastic Load Balancers with IPv6 targets, Amazon EKS IPv6 support and more. These features allow you to deliver business outcomes by building highly scalable architectures on IPv6 while maintaining backwards compatibility with your existing IPv4 workloads.

Benefits

Simplified architecture and reduced cost

IPv6 on AWS simplifies web architecture by minimizing the need for translation mechanisms. It also eliminates the need for complex architectures built using Private IPv4 addresses to work around constrained Public IPv4 addresses.

Scale beyond the limitation of IPv4 space

Scaling your application on AWS is no longer constrained by the number of IPv4 addresses in your VPC. By using IPv6, you can assign easy to manage contiguous IP ranges to micro-services and can get virtually unlimited scale for your applications in your VPCs.

Expand your global reachability

There is a surge in devices that connect to the internet, and an increasing number of them use IPv6 addresses. By making your applications on AWS IPv6 compatible, you are now able to do end to end native IPv6.

Use cases

Large scale microservices deployments

IPv6 makes it easy to scale containerized applications in your subnets by providing a significantly larger total IP address space, and allowing you to focus on migrating and scaling applications without devoting effort towards overcoming IPv4 limits.

Enterprises with global footprint

IPv6 network connectivity between your branch offices, data centers, and Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) can help you manage IPv4 exhaustion, easily integrate acquisitions, and simplify architectures.

Build differentiated consumer products

IPv6 allows you to build a scalable network of connected consumer applications that can seamlessly connect with each other and improve the devices security posture, by eliminating the need for address translations.

Netflix

IPv6 adoption in the internal network enabled the full IP reachability Netflix needed across the thousands of VPCs without the need for Network Address Translation. Also, the Egress-only Internet Gateway helped maintain the private subnets security posture.

Enabling IPv6 across the Netflix streaming platform in AWS enabled continued hyperscale growth, scalability and innovation.

Donavan Fritz, Senior Network SRE - Netflix
IMDb

A homegrown solution using Amazon EC2, API Gateway, AWS Step Functions and Lambda, provided a dual stack front-end and a translation layer that allowed us to maintain our IPv4 only private backend during this expansion.

We were able to expand our reach in the US market to 3x users by dialing up IMDbTV to successfully onboard IPv6-only connected devices.

Amy Lee, Manager Software Development - IMDbTV
Aroundhome

We have enabled IPv6 on our load balancers (ALB) and Cloudfront distributions so customers can already reach our services through IPv6. It turned out to be a very smooth process without any hiccups.

Within a short amount of time we were able to report nearly 40 percent of our customer traffic to be IPv6

Hendrik Bergunde, Team Lead Technology - Aroundhome