IPv6 in the Cloud - Back to Square One?

Analysing and reporting about IPv6 network capabilities of well-known PAAS and IAAS cloud providers and if common network concepts continue to work in such environments.

So you have it all set in your company. IPv6 address plan designed, got your IPv6 Internet uplinks, some of your external services are already accessible via IPv6 and you are in the process of bringing IPv6 to every corner in your network. Then your CIO bumps into your office, totally fascinated by those great possibilities and advantages of PAAS and IAAS - giving you the task to evaluate a hybrid cloud setup for your companies network and services. You start to google the meaning of PAAS and IAAS…

We will start with a short introduction of cloud terminology relevant for this talk. Then we will show our results of the analysis of the IPv6 readiness of cloud service providers. We focused on the big global cloud service providers, but also looked at some smaller providers, comparing offered features and functionality. We restricted our analysis on PAAS and IAAS, and focused on network related functionality: Addressing concepts, network services such as DNS, DHCP, SLAAC, to which extend one can simply extend its network concepts and its topology into the cloud. We conclude with recommendations whether and if so, how you should tackle IPv6 and cloud.