June 17, 2014 archive

We were very pleased to see the news that cloud platform provider Digital Ocean announced IPv6 support in their Singapore data center.  The announcement says in part:

Since our launch, IPv6 has been one of the most requested features in our community. Today we are excited to announce that public IPv6 addresses are now available for all Droplets in our Singapore region. IPv6 can be enabled during Droplet creation, or added to existing Droplets without the need for a reboot. This will be the standard for all new datacenter locations going forward – several of which will be launching within the next few months.

The article goes on to point to a number of articles that help users get started on IPv6.  There’s an ongoing discussion thread on the article where it seems that in this initial deployment Digital Ocean is not allocating a full /64 to each virtual private server (VPS) but rather allocating a smaller /124 instead. To their credit, the folks from Digital Ocean are engaged in the conversation and seeking feedback and information from people there.  (My only comment would be to point to the links off of our IPv6 address planning page and to RFC 6177/BCP 157, all of which generally recommend at least /64 for end networks. Still, there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach and it will be interesting to see what evolves in the cloud marketplace.)

More importantly, Digital Ocean moderators reconfirm in the comments that they will be implementing IPv6 across all their data centers and that all new data centers will support IPv6 from the start.

As we’ve written here over the past week, cloud providers need to get with the IPv6 program … and Microsoft ran out of “U.S.” IPv4 addresses for their Azure cloud … so it’s great to see a cloud provider starting down the path to having IPv6 everywhere!

If you want to join with Digital Ocean in making the transition to IPv6, please visit our “Start Here” page to find IPv6-related resources focused on your type of organization – and please do let us know if you can’t find what you are looking for!

P.S. There are of course discussion threads on this topic on both Hacker News and Reddit.

UPDATE: Moments after I hit “Publish” on this post, Digital Ocean tweeted out a chart showing the nice big spike in their IPv6 usage as people went in and enabled IPv6 on their VPS’. Very nice to see spikes like this!