Amazon finds $1B jackpot in its 100 million+ IPv4 address stockpile | The tech giant has cited ballooning costs associated with IPv4 addresses

Seriously? How can any device call themselves current gen and not support something as basic as this? That's just embarrassing.

Like what though?

The last thing I have that doesn't support ipv4 from the hardware level is my Nintendo DS.

Everything else has the hardware capability, it's just never used or enabled in the software by default.

thats why dual stack exists. so older devices can still be used on an ipv6 network.

just give us a functioning ipv6 infrastructure, and the majority of home routers in the marlet will deal with it seamlessly.

so i want to know whats the damn holdup at this point?? my 3rd world country has it but big US players like carriers and amazon seemingly cant do it.

Yikes. I get free IPv6 for my servers through Hurricane Electric since my ISP doesn't provide it yet, I wonder if their service also works on AWS? I mean come on, if someone like Comcast can figure it out, why is it so hard for a major player like Amazon?

IPv4 support is required and works perfectly.

Except it doesn't work perfectly, because it has a relatively small address space. That's why ipv6 exists.

“Luckily” we are reaching the point where IPv4 just isn’t going to be fiscally sustainable for the majority of companies, meaning the push to IPv6 will be hastened.

Though I don’t pretend it isn’t going to be a hell of a ride.

Even within AWS, many of their services still don't support ipv6. AWS fees for ipv4 addressing may end up being a comparatively big driver for adoption.

You just outlined a reason for AWS not to fully support IPv6 as well.

a lot of sys and net admins really don’t like the idea of every lan device being globally addressable

Those admins don't know what they're talking about. IPv6 has a region of the address space that can only be reached locally - similar to the 192.168.x.x space in IPv4. The only difference is it's really big (way bigger than the entire IPv4 space).

As for NAT... there's nothing stopping you from using it with IPv6. It's often unnecessary, but if you disagree you can use it. And in practice NAT is often part of the transition process to IPv6 - my cell network carrier for example gives my phone an IPv6 address on their internal network but routes all my traffic to the regular internet via IPv4. They are using NAT to do that. If you try to ping my phone's IPv6 address, it won't reach my phone.

They need to stop that nonsense. NAT is not for security, and was not designed for security purposes. In fact, there are a few ways it subverts security, such as SNI in TLS making the connection less private than it could be.

If they want to block external connections, a border firewall can do the job just fine without NAT. It's arguably better, because NAT complicates existing firewall rules and their implementation in code. Complications are the enemy of security.

Financial incentive does exist, but the problem is that it's a tragedy of the commons. Me upgrading only makes sense if everything else is also upgraded. Until then, it makes sense for me not to spend anything. However, everyone else is making exactly that same calculation.

ISPs have a lot of trouble managing IPv4. How much so depends on when you got your allocations. The first ISPs in the US got tons. The ones that grew out in other countries had to pick over the scraps. Even later US ISPs, particularly mobile carriers, got hit just as hard.

Those later arrivals have to implement Carrier Grade NAT, where all traffic goes through a small set of IPv4 addresses. Sometimes, it's multiple layers of NAT. It takes extra equipment and network design to support all this, which in turn affects speed, reliability, and cost.

Having global addresses instead of NAT means less control over your LAN

You can still have internal IP addresses and things like the router firewall work pretty much like they always have. I'm not sure what you mean by less control really.

these unique public addresses can track users more accurately

I feel like that concern is overblown. You get way more information from DNS, for way cheaper, than you get from "there were 27 devices, now there are 28!" and both takes being the ISP and observing the traffic.

It's also not like VPNs can't work in IPv6 land for people that really are conscious of hiding as much information about what they're doing from their ISP as possible.

is there any reason why we can't still use NAT with IPv6? it seems like that would solve at least some of the problems.