We've heard the IPv6 wave is coming -- although none too soon -- and Digital Ocean is going to ride it. The New York City-based IaaS provider plans to announce Tuesday that it is adding support for the new protocol -- which will open up millions of new IP addresses -- in its data centers in Singapore, Amsterdam, New York, and San Francisco.
It's a sort of rolling release, however. Singapore is up first, where the support will be tested out and the company will use that experience to implement across the other data centers, CEO Ben Uretsky said in a recent interview. All of those data centers should be fully aboard IPv6 by years' end, he added.
With more mobile devices, sensors and -- face it -- virtual machines running in clouds coming online by the minute, the demand for unique IP addresses is exploding and that's leading to IPv4 IP address exhaustion. "The issue is that IPv4 provides something like 4 billion unique addresses, which seemed sufficient in 1980 when the protocol was created, but nowadays there are billions of smartphones alone," he noted. There are IPv4 workarounds, but they are not elegant, he said.
The regional IP address authorities -- the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) in the U.S. -- have pretty much hit the bottom of the barrel. Uretsky said there are about 15 million IPv4 addresses left in the U.S. with Europe and Asia pretty much sold out, while there is some remaining capacity in Latin America and Africa. (Microsoft(s msft) already occasionally assigns IP addresses from other regions to U.S. workloads and if Microsoft can't get new IPv4 addresses you know we're in dire straits.)
"Cloud computing has accelerated pace of IP address consumption -- each of these Droplets we sell and every single Amazon(s amzn) EC2 server needs one. Cloud vendors lowered the barriers to entry but we also exacerbated this address problem," Uretsky said.
What this means is that all the big cloud providers -- Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google(s goog) etc -- need to get off the stick vis-a-vis IPv6 support in their clouds which should happen sooner rather than later. (Google App Engine does support IPv6, as does Amazon's ELB load balancing service.) IBM(s ibm) SoftLayer already supports IPv6 and Verizon(s vz) Cloud, due out this year, also supports IPv6.