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IPV6 Migration Guide for Developers using AWS EC2 -- A Primer
With the news that AWS will be now charging about $4 / instance-month for public IPv4 addresses, many developers who procrastinated ipv6 migration are finally updating both ends of their development setup.
It’s a great time to migrate, as all the intermediate infrastructure now supports IPV6 readily. Moreover, you’ll benefit from permanent , global addresses for your development instances.
Pros
- A single, global, stable address for EC2 instances that never changes. No need for dynamic DNS and other hacks
- No need to pay for Elastic IP addresses on dev instances
- Global addressing for mutual duplex services (no more NAT needed)
- Better flexibility and clarity for addressing, including Link Local & local addresses
Cons
- Time needed to migrate infra to IPV6
- Clumsier & less-memorable addresses, with unfamiliar idioms (e.g. no more using 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 – though there are replacements) inherent
- Bugs in legacy code that assumes 32 bit & string-representations of ipv4 addresses
Concepts & Approach
In theory, IPV6 uses 128bit addresses in place of 32 bit. Most of the intermediate infra (ISP, backbone) is now compatible. The two areas of attention for developers would be the server side with AWS , and the client side with your home/office network.
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Getting to Yes -- As Quickly as Possible
There was a great discussion a year ago about how fast gnu’s version of “yes” is. If you’re unfamiliar,
yesoutputsyindefinitely.yes |head -5 y y y y yThe key takeaway was that
writeis expensive and writing page-aligned buffers is much faster. The is true across languages, so let’s see how to do it properly in go.If you’re shocked or impressed by the results, let’s see you do it in your language – post your results in the comments.
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Opsworks before-migrate.rb
Opsworks is a convenient, powerful and free service provided by AWS to simplify the management of EC2 nodes. The real power of the system is exposed through customizing various stages of the instance lifecycle by creating custom-tailored chef-solo recipes.
While Amazon provides a powerful deployment layer for PHP applications, it stops short once the PHP code has been checked out of git. For Laravel or other composer apps, you’ll have to customize your deployment. The most elegant and straightforward method is through custom deployment hooks. Here’s how to build a before_migration.rb script to build a Laravel app.
Tony Metzidis
Software Developer