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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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In a company of 10,000+ employees, it took a 'small team' only 18 months to convert and test what took 11 years to build? I think that's pretty good.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Despite being an elegant and technologically sound solution, I think IPv6 will be adopted universally within a few years.
It may be "pretty good", hey it may be great. But if they're saying that it's easy enough for anyone to do, that's jsut not the case. At 20% of 18 months, that's almost 4 months of solid labour. If you told me that my business needed to take 4 months to do something, I'd tell you it had better be revenue-generating.
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.
Spoken like someone without a PhD. What you say is true only where the value of 'everything' is defined as 'procrastination'.
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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
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If you're Google, you have a very small market share in China, and are desperately trying to increase it. Consumer connections in China are going to be IPv6 or double-NAT'd IPv4 (so most things that punch holes in NAT won't work) very soon due to the way in which v4 addresses are allocated. Being the first service to work on China's v6 network is going to give them a big advantage in a rapidly-growing market.
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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!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Don't worry, since it's so easy, Google is donating its engineering resources to implement IPv6 for any company that wants it.
That's BS. They CAN be replaced but people are simply inflexible and corporations in particular get very scared of change when it comes to IS/IT. Software in 2009 can do anything software in 1979 could do, only better. Your analog modems are legacy equipment and they are there to support the PEOPLE who insist upon them - there ARE better solutions than merely kludging legacy support into every possible corporate upgrade. Ditch the old, get better stuff!
For example, a fully functional legacy PC system with analog serial ports etc. could be implemented entirely in software including an analog modem that handles DSP via the host, and the phone line via VoIP, and then virtualized on a server somewhere, and the physical legacy analog crap could be tossed out. But humans (i.e. workers familiar with the legacy system, as well as upper management) will NOT just jump on board to ideas like this without a lot of resistance. That doesn't mean they aren't do-able. The above example is still implementing the legacy solution, but not using legacy hardware. There is probably a much more elegant (albeit completely hypothetical as per this discussion) solution that ignores the legacy equipment, and if the corporation as a whole switched over to the new solution en masse, there would be no need for the legacy system.
The block is ALWAYS people when it comes to implementing technological upgrades within corporations. It's rarely the technology. Technology is easy to replace/toss out and re-implement. People are much harder to organize and manage than technology.
Oh... and is Google not a "real corporation" now? I am surprised by that statement. They are definitely young relative to corporations from the 18th century that may still exist, but they are not new kids on the block in their field. In addition, I would suspect their network and their tech footprint greatly exceeds that of the average "real corporation", and encompasses a lot more than what a company who doesn't specialize in online information indexing / data mining would need.
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There are sometimes compatibility issues with moving to something new.
I've spoken to one company who uses windows 98 machines, because their inventory system is on legacy software that requires windows 98, and the company who made that software went tits up. Since the software uses a proprietary binary format, its beyond the means of the company to switch to something new, even though there are affordable, and better, options.
This incidentally, is my biggest reason to push for FOSS, or at the least open standards, in the workplace, if you don't control the code, you can get royally screwed, either from a company going under, or declaring that your updates now cost 3 grand a license, even MS has dropped support for a format they created a time or two.
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