Amazon Web Services EC2 IPv6 Support

It’s official, the world has run out of IP addresses, at least IPv4 addresses, those 32-bit numbers that we are all so used to in the networking field. The solution to this problem has been around since 1999, when IPv6 was deployed, but it did not have adoption and the internet community as a whole decided to stay with IPv4 until it ran out.


Now it is time to start deploying workloads using IPv6; thankfully over the last couple of years AWS has been releasing support for IPv6 on many regions and has prepared to help its users with a seamless experience. IPv6 has plenty of room for growth and also opens the door to new applications and new use cases.


On December 1, 2016 AWS announced its support for IPv6 on EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). Earlier announcements included IPv6 support for S3 (including Transfer Acceleration), CloudFront, WAF, and Route 53. The first region with EC2 support for IPv6 was the US East (Ohio) Region.

Today AWS released IPv6 support for the following regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), South America (São Paulo), Canada (Central), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and AWS GovCloud (US)

Along with EC2, AWS released support for Application Load Balancer (ALB) to  have IPv6 in dual-stack mode, allowing access via IPv4 and IPv6, on the following regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), South America (São Paulo), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and AWS GovCloud (US)

AWS continues to innovate and pushing the envelope to have more regions be able to support IPv6.