RIPE held an IPv6 Education seminar in Amsterdam on this year’s World IPv6 Day (6 June). There were 18 presentations in seven hours. Lots of good presentations, here some of the highlights.
ISP Status
The good news is that IPv6 deployment continues to increase with Mobile operators taking the lead.
IP Transitions
Sadly, there are still IPv4-only sites out there in the world. We are going to need Transition Mechanisms to get there. NAT64 is not without its problems, most notably, it breaks DNSSEC. But its cousin, 464XLAT does not break DNSSEC, and it provides IPv4 support for the Apps which, unfortunately, still use IPv4-only socket calls.
Guidance on how to get to IPv6-only
There was also good guidance on how to get to IPv6-only. After all, dual-stack is not the end goal, but a transition mechanism to get to IPv6-only. OpenWrt routers already support a CLAT client, making 464XLAT even easier to deploy.
The cost of IPv4 is going up
Lastly, it was pointed out that the cost of computing continues its downward trend while the cost of IPv4 addresses is increasing. And this has proven to be one of business case drivers for some Cloud Providers to move to IPv6-only.
One can now buy a Raspberry PI Zero for $5, and the IPv4 address for that computer is going to cost nearly 5 times as much.
Celebrating IPv6 Day
The IPv6 Educa was well attended, with about 150 people online, and was quite timely given that 6 June was the 6th anniversary of World IPv6 Launch Day (in 2012). The Educa Agenda and recording can be found online.
Go forth and Deploy.