Amazon finds $1B jackpot in its 100 million+ IPv4 address stockpile | The tech giant has cited ballooning costs associated with IPv4 addresses::undefined
Amazon finds $1B jackpot in its 100 million+ IPv4 address stockpile | The tech giant has cited ballooning costs associated with IPv4 addresses::undefined
I remember doing an IT course over a decade ago and learning about IPv6 taking over, honestly surprised it hasn’t yet. I just looked it up and apparently they came up with it in 1998. How is it taking so long? Is there some technical reason it’s harder or something? Does the extra address size mean a not so great trade off in traffic or something?
note: I did study a bit of networking and IT but have forgotten everything mostly and work in a different field, thus my ignorance.
IPv6 is here, and has been for a long time. But if, for example, your web or email server can only be reached over IPv6 some people will not be able to load the site or send emails to you.
The entire internet is configured to work with IPv4. Some of the internet (less than a quarter) is also configured to also work with IPv6.
Imagine if your home had two driveways on different streets. Do you tell everyone both addresses, or do you pick one of them? Probably just one right? Now imagine if the second address can only be reached if someone has an off road capable vehicle. And you don’t know what vehicle someone has - which address would you give them? Is it even worth having two driveways?
That’s the situation we’re in. IPv4 support is required and works perfectly. IPv6 is optional and doesn’t always work.
Except it doesn’t work perfectly, because it has a relatively small address space. That’s why ipv6 exists.
The driveway works perfectly, but it doesn’t have space for all the guests if they all want to use their own vehicles.
Thankfully, we have carpooling and rideshares.
Great analogy, thanks
To add to what others have said, I’ve heard that wide adoption of NATing as a standard practice basically ensured IPv4 longevity well beyond its logical end. This along with the cost to fully upgrade a network to IPv6 meant there was no financial incentive for companies to adopt it.
With Amazon starting to charge for IPv4 addresses, it won’t be long before Google and Microsoft do the same with GCP and Azure. This may be the financial kick in the ass to get large enterprise environments to finally commit to IPv6.