I saw a bunch of people discussing this article. Basically it is saying that after 20 years IPv6 has only reached 10% deployment rate. I actually expect that number to start growing faster now since IPv4 addresses have been exhausted. At a certain point the cost of rolling out IPv6 will be less than horrible solutions like Carrier Grade NAT if the ISP doesn’t have enough IP Addresses. I always expected them to start rolling out IPv6 on Cell Phones given the number of devices and the growth rate, but I haven’t heard about anyone doing that yet.

This got me to thinking well this is an opportunity I have never played around with IPv6 networking. So I figured I could learn something by trying to configure a dual stack setup of this site. Unfortunately that isn’t going to be happening. I did a little research and it seems that Amazon doesn’t support IPv6 on EC2. It looks like for a time in 2011 they were supporting it on their Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) which would terminate IPv6 and then connect to your site behind it with IPv4. But for those of us with a small site with just a few readers the cost of ELB couldn’t be justified, and it isn’t even an option on a newer EC2 account.

So in the end my great idea for a post and something to learn (setting up a dual IP stack on the machine, configuring DNS to have an AAAA record and all of that) won’t be able to happen until Amazon decides they need to support IPv6. I spoke with a friend to see if he has his site on v6 and he has the same problem, he self hosts over a Comcast Business Account and they also don’t support IPv6. I would wager that part of the reason that deployment is so low is that many people who would be willing to play around with it and deploy it aren’t able to, due to the network providers.