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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."
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I wouldn't call something that take 18 months to do "easy". :-|
Maybe that's why I don't work at google
You can't take the sky from me...
Google allows it's employees to use 20% of their WORK DAY for personal projects. So technically this wasn't "extra" work.
Despite being an elegant and technologically sound solution, I think IPv6 will be adopted universally within a few years.
It's very easy to do. Most if not all servers are currently IPv6 compatible and most of the software has this type of stuff abstracted away by the operating system.
Then all you need to do is ask your provider for an IPv6 range and put some records in your DNS, enable your clients for IPv6, tell your routers that they'll from now on see IPv6 addresses as well (usually already in the firmware or it's in an upgrade somewhere) let your DHCP server give out IPv6 addresses and then you're done. Add an IPv4 to IPv6 gateway if your provider doesn't support IPv6 yet.
This all can be done in several steps and IPv4 can keep chugging at the same time as well so there is practically no downtime to the systems. It's the same as adding an IPv4 range to your network (if you ever run out of space in your range) except that there are more digits and that some of your older hardware needs a small upgrade.
The problem is that it requires manpower to do so which isn't cheap. In an organization like Google it takes a group a while at 20% of their time. In many organizations, those groups are 1) not as competent, 2) don't have 10% of free time, let alone 20%, 3) this has to be justified as far as manpower costs go.
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Define 'small team' - 5 people? 200? What's a 'small team' at Google?
The fact that Google makes such a big deal about only hiring the best and brightest and PhDs and such also indicates this isn't 'easy'. If it took a team of people who are regarded to be the best and brightest in their industry, with numerous PhDs on the team (or at least at their disposal on campus) *18 months* to do something (even part time) that still means that this is going to be a bigger issue for most companies.
Consider that the bulk of Google's apps that would need to be 'converted' have been written in the past 3-4 years (docs, maps, earth, etc.), and likely were written by people who put modularity and efficiency much higher than the average developer does (or is allowed to, in many cases) and you'll conclude that average developers who've inherited undocumented legacy code from previous average developers will have a much harder time than expected.
The core problem (as someone else pointed out) is consumer-level adoption - ISPs, routers, etc. It's somewhat chicken and egg, and perhaps having Google announce 100% support for it, this will give other players in the field the encouragement to put more effort in to transitioning over.
Lastly, why didn't Google (of all companies) bake IPv6 in to these main apps when they were first written?
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I suspect that having a comparatively short history, and thus not much legacy software(and little of that from third parties) probably makes life very much easier.
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.
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Does anyone have a list of current networking hardware that is IPv6 ready? Specifically I am interested in any gateway/routers that support IPv6 out of the box, in the sub-$200 category.
I know about DD-WRT, but I don't want to have spend time hacking my router.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
"
Everything is still in Beta. Don't think they can close any line items yet.
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
No sig for the moment.
there will be additional latency and significantly more overhead involved in routing IPV6 traffic
Errmm.. I think you would actually find out that with some IPv6 features like route aggregation and the checksum-less IPv6 header, things should be faster. But yes IPv6 routing without hardware capable of switching IPv6 packets will definately be slower.
If the entire net were converted to IPV6 today, it would melt.
The only reason it's going to melt is because the majority of "IPv6 support" out there uses software-based routing
Fortunately people will likely continue to use IPV4 for a long time and the IPV6 traffic will grow slowly enough that router technology will improve as necessary.
Router technology IS already here. Most hardware vendors already support IPv6 switching.
Don't worry, since it's so easy, Google is donating its engineering resources to implement IPv6 for any company that wants it.
NAT (or more correctly in most cases PAT) is not a security feature.
More pushback comes from security-mastar types, who've been trained in an IPv4-only world. IPv6 forces them to do two things they hate doing: a) properly secure perimeter devices, and b) ensure that each host is secure.
A lot of it, of course, stems from the Win9x/NT4/2k days, when outbreaks on internal networks caused major business disruptions.