Google Engineers Say IPv6 Is Easy, Not Expensive

alphadogg writes "Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company's applications to support IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol. 'We can provide all Google services over IPv6,' said Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti during a panel discussion held in San Francisco Tuesday at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Colitti said a 'small, core team' spent 18 months enabling IPv6, from the initial network architecture and software engineering work, through a pilot phase, until Google over IPv6 was made publicly available. Google engineers worked on the IPv6 effort as a 20% project — meaning it was in addition to their regular work — from July 2007 until January 2009."

Comments

An elegant solution

[Sybert42]

Despite being an elegant and technologically sound solution, I think IPv6 will be adopted universally within a few years.

Re:An elegant solution

[riffzifnab]

The best part is that it's never out of date!

Re:Not easy, and not the core problem

[ewenix]

Lastly, why didn't Google (of all companies) bake IPv6 in to these main apps when they were first written?

Perhaps the best and brightest spent 18 months of extra time on the massage table and drinking smoothies.
Then recently edited the .conf to include the line $IPV6 = 1;

Re:Not easy, and not the core problem

[D Ninja]

Lastly, why didn't Google (of all companies) bake IPv6 in to these main apps when they were first written?

Because, just as you said, Google hires the best. These guys needed a challenge. They gave themselves one.

(I'm kidding.)

Re:Yep..

[just_another_sean]

Things are easy when you're GOOG

Yeah my first reactions was that this is a lot like Les Paul telling people that playing guitar is easy.

So big, we have to use maths

[ircharlie]

This made me laugh. From TFA:
"
IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support approximately 4.3 billion individually addressed devices on the Internet. IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and can support so many devices that only a mathematical expression -- 2 to the 128th power -- can quantify its size.
"

Re:So big, we have to use maths

[Anonymous Coward]

So does your mom.

Re:So big, we have to use maths

[nog_lorp]

Sorry, I cannot allow you to post that. That number is impossible to write.

Clocks still ticking

[sunking2]

Everything is still in Beta. Don't think they can close any line items yet.

Re:v6?

[4D6963]

You think that's bad? I'm still stuck with IPv3.11 for Workgroups!

Re:Yep..

[Abreu]

Some years ago, Eddie Van Halen said that guitar playing "is not as hard as brain surgery"

Sometime later, he got an offer from a brain surgeon to trade some guitar lessons for some brain surgery lessons

Re:It is technically very easy

[morgan_greywolf]

On the plus side, crap consumer routers have a nasty habit of dropping dead every 18 months, so you can deal with legacy hardware by just waiting.

Funny, I've had my LinkSys WRT54G for about 2.5 years and it sti

Re:easy?

[AliasMarlowe]

Spoken like someone without a PhD. What you say is true only where the value of 'everything' is defined as 'procrastination'.

And if anyone on the team has TWO PhDs, then even procrastination becomes mind-bogglingly difficult.

Re:Addition to regular work?

[AliasMarlowe]

Google allows it's employees to use 20% of their WORK DAY for personal projects.

But that's the 20% that the rest of us spend drunk. Bad deal, evil Google!

Re:Yep..

[mcostas]

Don't worry, since it's so easy, Google is donating its engineering resources to implement IPv6 for any company that wants it.