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How long should a protocol upgrade take? I cant help but feel that IPv6 has a flawed upgrade path.

It would be so much better to upgrade to a protocol that is directly compatible with IPv4 and does not require deployment and maintenance a second network in parallel to IPv4.

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I don't work at Reddit so I can only guess, but one does not have to convert most of their infrastructure to ipv6. Traffic terminates to load balancers and those would need ipv6 listeners. Everything behind them can remain ipv4 for the next million years or so if one was so inclined. The only gotchas would be anything inside their datacenter that hairpins back to the load balancer for whatever reason and there are easy work-arounds for that by creating WAN or internal vips that are ipv4.

That doesn't seem possible. Fundamentally you need more addresses than IPv4 can represent, so legacy programs wouldn't be able to handle the addresses of any system which solved that problem.

Now, you could have an upgraded system which kept a lot more the same from IPv4 and just added more addresses. But I personally think the extra kitchen sink added in IPv6 is only a small part of why it's adoption has struggled.

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