iOS9, IPv6, £20pa off v6 only VMs
tldr; Apple say IPv6 support vital, we offer £20pa off any VM that is IPv6 only.
Apple have announced that as of iOS 9, all apps require support for IPv6 and must run on an IPv6 only network. The motivation is fairly clear, T-Mobile USA runs an IPv6 only network, Comcast is deploying IPv6 and on IPv6 launch day in Finland 5% of users had IPv6 enabled simultaneously. Google sees around 7% of all traffic as IPv6 now.
Like it or not, IPv6 is here and the predictions of a lengthy period of being dual stack were wrong. Nobody bothered to turn on IPv6 until IPv4 ran out, then instead of IPv6 and Network Address Translation we’re skipping quickly to IPv6 only. If your application doesn’t work on an IPv6 only network an increasing fraction of users simply can’t use it.
At Mythic Beasts we’ve been using IPv6 for a long time. Two years ago we rebuilt the hosting infrastructure for Raspberry PI to be IPv6 only for all internal connections. A future article will explain our scale up to vastly more VMs, many IPv6 only. IPv6 at Mythic Beasts isn’t an add-on, if our IPv6 connectivity breaks, customers go offline. We’re steadily working on spreading IPv6 connectivity throughout other providers.
. @akismet we’ve some VMs on an IPv6 only network which do everything perfectly apart from talk to you, any chance of an AAAA record? #IPv6
— Mythic Beasts (@Mythic_Beasts) April 24, 2015
We’ve been offering developers IPv6 only Virtual Machines for experimentation for a while, and have one of the most comprehensive IPv6 connectivity checkers for hosted software which is very good at demonstrating that enabling a v6 address isn’t quite enough.
Every single connection to this website uses IPv6.
The best way to build the hosting infrastructure today, is to have an IPv6 only network for the whole thing and a single IPv4 address on the load balancer for ‘legacy’ IPv4 connections. To give everyone an incentive to do it right, today we’re extending our IPv6 only VM offer – all virtual machines that are IPv6 only will be discounted for the lifetime of the rental.
If you’re really interested, this presentation at the North American Operators Group about the largest US ISPs moving straight to IPv6 only deployments including the information that over 20% of US users have native IPv6.