[linuxftw]

The problem isn't supporting IPv6, the problem is often having to support both 4 and 6 simultaneously. There's just a ton of work to get a single IP stack working on infrastructure, and it's more than twice the work to get 2 working in tandem.

[CountSessine]

Is it really? In 2020? What examples are there? I worked on network switches at a major switch manufacturer and our IPv6 setup mostly just came along for the ride (or at least I thought it did - maybe our customers thought differently!)

(Genuinely interested in hearing war stories from the front on this)

[linuxftw]

Just look at the amount of engineering effort and time that has gone into projects like kubernetes: https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/issues/508

That's just for IPv6 support, which is beta, and took years to get there. Dual Stack is still in alpha, and that didn't appear until a really recent release (1.16).

I think routers and switches are probably the easier pieces of the puzzle, at least as far as managing them goes. The vendors have worked out all the kinks (hopefully?) before the equipment gets to you.

That's just to get the stuff to work. Then you have corporate/government policies and validation. Then you have to solve problems like "My VM resolves things to IPv6 by default, but I have no IPv6 gateway so everything times out". And then make sure that logic makes it up through your entire stack. Multicast? Not allowed on many networks.

Is it the end of the world? No. It's just a lot of extra work for everyone.

[CountSessine]

Yeah - that’s been my intuition, too. First we got software support in switches. Then OS network stacks started to support it. Then we got hardware switching chips that supported it. But the application and deployment layers just seem to be super hard. Just look at how hard it’s been to get IPv6 on AWS.

Someday, hopefully!