The resistance to switch to ipv6, or the comfort with the ipv4-born address exhaustion remedies, only helps an internet of consumers, not an internet of peers that create and share. If you are behind NAT or CG-NAT, you can only consume, not create. You can't host a server, expose a port. You are at the mercy of the big fish.
I actually made the unusual decision, last year, to go IPv6-only on a small website I operate. The reason why is that AWS changed their billing policy for public IPv4 addresses. This is a tiny website that people only access on their cell phones, so I can accept an occasional inconvenience for the marginal cost savings.<p>I haven't heard of anyone else doing this, but I doubt I'm completely alone in trying to minimize hosting costs.
I don't understand the title. What's the "but" there? IPv6 being irrelevant and moving off IPv4 being irrelevant seem like they go hand in hand, if moving off IPv4 is irrelevant then of course IPv6 is irrelevant!
IPv6 and Python 3 are case studies in How to Not Upgrade Something.<p>They basically created entirely different products that provided a marginal <i>immediate</i> benefit to the users and then said "upgrade whenever you get around to it". They are both now in the 2nd decade of their upgrade cycle.<p>PowerPC->Intel, Xbox/PlayStation emulation, x86 32-bit>64-bit, and Java are all technologies that had successful upgrade strategies that were centered around replacing the original product rather than indefinitely providing an alternative.
Discussion on the original weblog post this article talks about (The IPv6 Transition (potaroo.net), 224 points by todsacerdoti 3 days ago):<p>* <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41893200">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41893200</a><p>(The The APNIC article is a repost of the potaroo.net article.)
I mean its an opinion.<p>The argument is somewhat thin "CDNs use DNS so it doesn't matter what the IP is"<p>I mean yes, that true, but it should have always been true. Dishing out raw IPs is bad anyway, it limits your flexibility (yes yes anycast exists, but if you're big enough to setup any cast, I bet you're using ipv6 internally already)<p>Ipv6 is here, and will slowly grow as time goes on. There will be growing pains, but its plain cheaper to run at any kind of scale. (especially now AWS are charging for public IPv4 addresses)<p>If you are hosting thousands of servers, and you haven't drunken the batshit K8s networking schema, then ipv6 becomes really rather practical, especially if you are giving out unique addresses to containers 10.0.0.0/8 runs out pretty quick.
Felt like the article went off into lala land towards the end:<p>“The last couple of decades have seen us stripping out network-centric functionality and replacing this with an undistinguished commodity packet transport medium. It's fast and cheap, but it's up to applications to overlay this common basic service with its own requirements." The result is networks become "simple dumb pipes!"<p>Given that, Huston wonders if it's time to revisit the definition of the internet as networks that use a common shared transmission fabric, a common suite of protocols and a common protocol address pool.<p>Rather, he posits "Is today's network more like 'a disparate collection of services that share common referential mechanisms using a common namespace?'"
Lots of consumer router/gateways out there are old and don't have IPv6 turned on. If you turn off IPv4 for your services, those folks just won't be able to connect and they won't know why, they'll just move on. Any who want to complain won't even know who to complain to, and they won't be able to fix it themselves. That's bad. And yes, you could put a CDN in front of everything, but won't that wipe out some/all of the savings (assuming you're with a cloud provider that's charging for IPv4)? This basically explains why I put the brakes on our IPv6 migrations. From our clients' perspective it would have been an unforced error.
Geoff's post was also discussed here this week: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41893200">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41893200</a>
Anycast and SNI mean someone like cloud flare only needs one IPv4 for their entire public facing service? Is that the gist? Obviously I exaggerate but I think that's their point?