Weekly Journal 42 - AWS IPv6
Synopsis
Most of my time has been devoted to a couple of major work projects that are in their final stages. I did find some time to start looking at IPv6 support in AWS as we’re going to need it for an upcoming project.
AWS IPv6
We have a potential customer who has inquired about IPv6 support for our SaaS applications. While we figure out exactly what that means, I have been doing some research to see how AWS supports IPv6. One thing in particular I have found is that you can potentially support IPv6 for users of a service without having a full IPv6 implementation inside of your AWS VPC. This can be accomplished one of two ways:
- Provision CloudFront as the entry point to your application. CloudFront is a content delivery system and cache for web applications. The interesting thing is CloudFront supports IPv6, but doesn’t get provisioned inside of your VPC. This means you can put CloudFront in front of your application, configure it for IPv6, and let it take care of processing client requests using IPv6 and then forwarding them to your resources inside the VPC using IPv4.
- Similarly, you can enable IPv6 in your VPC, and then assign IPv6 addresses to the Application Load Balancer that is the ingress endpoint for your application. It will also take of translating IPv6 requests into IPv4 and forwarding them to resources inside of your VPC.
I’m interested in exploring both options to see how they apply to our situation.
What’s Next?
Sadly, the rollout of my work projects has been delayed, so I won’t be working on my personal projects any time soon.