Weekly Journal 53 - New Year, IPv6

tl;dr

2022 is going strong. I’m getting the opportunity to learn a bit about IPv6.

Beginning of 2022

I went back to work this week and it almost felt strange after spending 10 days off. We hit the ground running as we have some major projects we’re going to be working on the first half of this year. One of the interesting ones, to me, involves getting some of our cloud services running under IPv6. Some of our customers have been asking about IPv6 support, and we’re looking at getting that implemented. Otherwise I spent the week working on planning and other managerial stuff as we get ready to kick off our first program increment of the year.

AWS IPV6

I know very little about IPv6, so this is going to be a fun learning experience. This week I managed to stand up a test environment in AWS with a dual-stack VPC that supports both IPv4 and IPv6. I found it interesting that it was very easy to enable IPv6 support in the VPC and configure it on my network subnets using an existing IPv4 VPC. I also learned that the Amazon load balancers double as 6-to-4 proxy gateways. This means that I can assign IPv6 addresses to the load balancer, but I can leave my EC2 instances running with IPv4 addresses. Clients can make IPv6 network requests to the load balancer, and it will take care of translating between IPv6 to IPv4 and back again. The load balancers even respond to the same DNS name with proper IP address based on the type of the request.

What’s Next?

Wrapping up planning for work and maybe starting on my personal knowledge base project.