March 22, 2014 archive

Wow!  At the v6 World Congress this week in Paris (where Chris and Jan were), Facebook’s Paul Saab gave a very impressive presentation about what Facebook has gone through to convert its internal network over to IPv6.  Paul has now posted his presentation online (in the IPv6 Group on Facebook, of course) and the story he relays with all the bumps and issues is great to see.  Here’s the key slide at the end showing where they are at:

Those statistics are:

• 100% of  hosts they care about respond on IPv6  (Hosts that are not IPv6 ready are going away.)
• 75% of internal traffic is now IPv6 with a goal to be at 100% by Q3 2014 or earlier
• 98% of traffic in and out of HHVM is IPv6
• 100% of our memcache traffic is IPv6
• A goal of being 100% IPv6-only in 2-3 years

VERY impressive!   Paul’s entire presentation is worth a read as he outlines a good number of the challenges they ran into, from vendors equipment not supporting IPv6 to engineers always writing in IPv6 to some of the problems they had with software.  It’s all great info and good to have out there as a case study and for others to learn from.

I love that he ends noting that engineers are asking if they can start writing IPv6-only code today!  (I also enjoy that the “solution” to stopping engineers from writing IPv4-only code was simple: take away IPv4 on development systems! )

So… Facebook is going to be out in front of most other companies with having made the transition over to IPv6. What are you waiting for?  Check out our IPv6 resources and let us know if there is anything more we can do to help you!