The phone numbers of the Internet are changing. Slowly but surely the interweb is moving away from the old Internet Protocol, IPv4, to the newer one, IPv6. Operative word: slowly. At a rate of 4% a year, according to Google.
IPv4 hails from a time when the Internet was little more than an obscure project run by some exceptionally smart scientists at the Advanced Research Projects Agency. IPv4 was designed around a 32-bit address system, which means it could accommodate up to 4.3 billion devices. This was an astronomical figure in 1982. Back then, computers numbered in the thousands, and not many people could foresee what was about to happen.
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977
What’s so great about IPv6?
The IPv6 is a significant upgrade. Not only does it provide a much larger address space (128 bit) but it also offers a more efficient allocation of addresses and some networking advantages too. It might even make things faster for us (Facebook claims that mobile devices enjoy 20-40% faster newsfeeds over IPv6).
One thing is for certain: IPv6 is a protocol designed for a profoundly different reality than its predecessor.
We now fully support IPv6! Humana humana awooga!!
— Imgur (@imgur) June 29, 2012
So where is the download link? How do I get this newer and better Internet?
Hold on trigger. . . it’s not that easy. The two protocols are not compatible. That’s one of the reasons why IPv6 adoption has grown at a glacial pace since it was conceived two decades ago.
For this new protocol to work, and for IPv4 to be retired, every single component on the network needs to be upgraded: software, firmware, routers, load balancers, firewalls, absolutely everything. No wonder the world has only reached 10% adoption in those twenty years.
Our IPv6 Support Journey
In 2013 we upgraded all our office equipment to support IPv6. We didn’t touch our customer-facing systems however, because there was zero demand for IPv6 at the time. It wasn’t until late 2015 that some of our customers started offering their service over IPv6, and consequently needed IPv6 service checks from us.
Website checks are initiated by Server Density (to imitate the end-user journey), so if we want to monitor services hosted on IPv6, the respective monitoring function needs to happen over IPv6. To implement that, we first had to check all the providers that host the monitoring locations (actors) and validate that their IPv6 support works as expected.
We then tweaked the Server Density UI and added an IP version toggle, as seen below. At the same time, we began working on the respective backend service checks. Total development time was just under three weeks.
As of March 2016, Server Density supports IPv6 for web checks and service monitoring. It will automatically resolve any IPv6 addresses first (if advertised in the DNS for the specified hostname).
Device postbacks will continue to be IPv4 only. When it comes to device monitoring, the Server Density agent sends proactive postbacks to our systems, i.e. communication is incoming and initiated by client servers. We do not yet support device postbacks over IPv6 (This feature is in our roadmap. In the meantime you can use our forwarding proxy on an IPv4 machine with IPv6 servers posting back through the proxy).
So close and yet so far
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority issued the last remaining sets of IPv4 addresses in 2011 and the distribution of this final batch of addresses is all but depleted.
We have run out of time, or space rather.
The adoption of IPv6 will most probably speed up in 2016. Many mobile phone carriers are already starting to switch their networks to IPv6. As of January 2016, Apple won’t approve IPv4-only apps. Device manufacturers and cloud providers are following suit (Rackspace and Softlayer have already started supporting IPv6. It’s only a matter of time before Amazon, Azure, and everyone else, do the same).
So what about you? Have you started on your IPv6 journey yet?
PS: You can check your IPv6 readiness here.
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