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Does Amazon Web Services support IPv6?

The dwindling supply of IPv4 addresses has created a huge demand for IPv6 addresses. It should be noted that, several regions have already exhausted available IPv4 addresses, thereby creating an urgent need for IPv6 addresses.

IPV6 support appears to the selective and few of Amazon Cloud Services for example, if you are using EC2 Classic, then IPV6 support is assured but not in case of EC2 VPC. One should also note that EC2 Classic is not offered to fresh accounts anymore. IPV6 support was allowed on end points of Elastic Load Balancers.

Users of old accounts are still able to access resources of EC2- Classic which is supported by IPv4, as well as IPv6. This implies that only a select few accounts are allowed IPv6 support.

In terms of Virtual Private Clouds, the native IPV6 support is offered as a new feature for users of EC2 platform. Users can operate their Virtual Private Clouds in a dual stack mode environment. This allows the server resources to operate over whichever or both protocols at a time or as separate instances.

In order to achieve this you need to integrate an IPv6 CIDR block with the presently associated subnets as well as the existing Virtual Private Cloud. The assigning of IPv6 CIDR block is performed by Amazon.

Since IPv6 cannot be supported by NAT devices, in order to establish communication between Internet and the private subnets of your infrastructure, you will have to form an egress specific internet gateway. IPv6 traffic can be supported only by an egress-only internet gateway. Secondly, your instance type should be supporting IPv6 otherwise it should be changed.

For assured routing of IPv6 traffic, the routing tables must be properly updated. This also applies to security rules that should be updated to cover IPv6 addresses. Assigning of IPv6 addresses in relation with your subnet’s address range can be initiated after complete enablement of IPv6.