[jsmthrowaway]

All of those things are doing gymnastics with ports because nobody can be bothered to ship IPv6. If you can bring v6 up you can assign every process an IP and start assuming ports (80 is the service via HTTP, 443 via TLS, 8080 via HTTP/2 gRPC, 9000 for monitoring, and so on). It's way cleaner than all the work around ports in the current state of the art and means you can Just Use DNS in a number of scenarios. There are whole systems around ports in pretty much every orchestration system and it's such an antipattern, really. Half of Docker's networking stack, a bunch of Kubernetes logic, Flannel, all of it becomes unnecessary and they represent attempts to jam the right way into limited IP and limited address table space on infrastructure.

IPv6 is practically built for containers, and, to Kubernetes's credit, they architected with that in mind. (Learned from BNS.) Weirdly, what I'm saying here was the original idea behind ports in the first place. There just aren't enough of them, particularly when half your space is shared with client sockets.

I want a world where v4 is pretty much just my control plane into the v6 cluster, since I'll die before IPv4. Google and far more importantly Amazon need to come up with a v6 story in their cloud offerings already. AWS has had a decade. This isn't just blind advocacy any more; the orchestration and software side is starting to build entire parts of the OSI stack because the network side of our industry is stuck without any sign of moving, no matter how dire the v4 situation.