Now that AWS is charging per IPv4 address as of February 2024, suddenly lack of IPv6 support has economic consequences for AWS customers. Thus, the reason for this page is to highlight IPv6 gaps across AWS's service offerings.
| Service | Corey's Commentary |
|---|---|
| VPC Reachability Analyzer | Networks break; if you want to figure out why, you'd best be using an IPv4 stack. Even AWS doesn't know how to charge you to fix your IPv6 problems... |
| Load Balancers | Yes, these support IPv6 in dual-stack configuration--but the price of each of these just went up by $3.50 a month for every AZ they have a listener hanging out within. Network Load Balancers don't listen on UDP if they're set to dual stack, Classic ELBs only support IPv6 if they're in the now-deprecated EC2 Classic, and Application Load Balancers seem... mostly okay? Gateway Load Balancers have no use case that I have discovered yet. Yes, I know, today almost nobody needs a pure IPv6 load balancer, but the future is coming. |
| Gateway Endpoints | If you want the only two services that offer gateway endpoints in private Subnets (S3 and DynamoDB) to continue to not incur significant charges when passing through a Managed NAT Gateway, these things need to support IPv4 to get you there; in an IPv6 only environment you theoretically don't need these as NAT isn't a concern, but in dual-stack environments I feel like a lot of stuff is going to bias for the 4.5¢ per GB option rather than the free one. |
| EC2 Instance Connect | EC2 Instance Connect doesn't support IPv6, full stop. That means that for this to work you've gotta use IPv4, and also get yourself into the privately-addressed range via VPN, Direct Connect, Arcane Prayers, etc. |
| Auto Scaling Groups | Auto Scaling Groups can only register/de-register instances to target groups via 'instance-id' and not 'ip-address', and 'instance-id' only supports IPv4 targets. |
| Systems Manager | The SSM Agent requires IPv4 access to Systems Manager endpoints in order to function |
| Kinesis/SQS | Examples of possible high volume AWS services, not supporting IPv6. Requiring you to make the trade of between paying |
| App Runner | No option to select IPv6. Defaults to IPv4. |