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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

Can I enable IPv6 on all instances in a VPC that is already deployed in us-west-1? Does this require stopping and starting all instances?

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Here's an outline of the steps you need to take to get things working:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/vpc-mi...

Thanks for linking. It looks a little involved.

  1.) Allocate and associate an IPv6 block to the VPC.
  2.) Configure internet gateway and routes in the VPC.
  3.) Update security groups to include IPv6 in the VPC.
  4.) Confirm current instance types support IPv6.
  5.) Assign IPv6 address to instances.
  6.) May require manual network setup on each instance if not using DHCPv6.

This complexity (lack of abstraction) is why I prefer Google Cloud Platform. While GCP currently does not support IPv6, when they do support it, I am willing to bet they will roll it out as a turn-key button click.

I don't think your steps would be all that simpler on GCP unless you're running off app engine.

I certainly hope that a click of a button doesn't log into my instance, adjust network configuration files, reload the network stack, and permit all ipv6 traffic in...

Easy there.. I was not advocating any OS/instance level changes by Google. It is just that GCP seems to abstract away concepts like internet gateways and NAT instances, perhaps making the switch to IPv6 on GCP easier than AWS.

AWS used to as well. However, that doesn't work if you're an enterprise moving legacy systems up to the cloud that expect certain network addressing schemes.

Amazon.com itself didn't move to AWS until VPC supported the bring your own address primitives. Not everyone can clean slate rewrite systems to bring them to the cloud, Amazon recognizing this is going to keep them dominating the market.

None of those steps are unreasonable if you're using EC2. An ops person wouldn't _want_ any of those things taken away.

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