As we enter the internet of things era, with millions; check that, billions of devices coming online, we’re to need a lot more unique IP addresses. That means the big cloud providers need to get on the stick to support IPv6, the internet protocol that opens up billions of new addresses for just that purpose.
Thus far (and sort of surprising to me) MicrosoftAzure does not support IPv6 yet. Nor does Google Compute Engine although the company “is a major advocate of IPv6 and it is an important future direction.” (Maybe some news to come in the weeks running up to Google I/O?)
Public cloud leader Amazon Web Services is still on IPv4 except for its Elastic Block Store (EBS) service. IBM SoftLayer, on the other hand, has supported IPv6 for a few years and the upcoming Verizon Cloud, due the second half of this year, will as well.
The need is clear – Gartner estimates that 26 billion devices will be online by 2020 , a 30 times increase from the 900 million connected devices in 2009. The address registries, including the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), and its analogues in Asia, Europe and Latin America, have warned about impending “IPv4 address exhaustion.”
The challenges that the device population explosion pose to cloud providers and the very architecture of data centers will be a hot topic next week at Structure.
So how hard is it to move from IPv4 to IPv6? It doesn’t necessarily require a wholesale upgrade of networking hardware and software, but it’s still a bear, according to an exec with a networking company that has moved some of its higher-level services over to IPv6 in the past year or so. He was unwilling to be named because he is unauthorized to speak on behalf of his company.
“The challenge is that your systems are complex and interconnected with other people’s stuff. So you call network provider X and ask for an IPv6 connection — some will say, ‘sure,’ others will say ‘IpV what?’ And you have to turn over a lot of rocks in your own systems to see what you have and what your equipment supports,” the executive said.
The biggest issue is that IPv4 is very well-known and IPv6 not so much. “Anything you do that deals with IP addresses, anything that does validation, geolocation, or handles log files will expect to get no more than 15 characters or whatever and now [with IPv6 addresses] will get a much longer string typically,” he noted.
That requires a lot of advance research and planning. But it’s not like this is an unforseen event. My bet is in coming months we’ll see a spate of news from cloud providers.
Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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- The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators
- What you missed in cloud in the third quarter of 2013
- How new devices, networks, and consumer habits will change the web experience