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

Re:easy?

[Aladrin]

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.

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The best part is that it's never out of date!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

Clocks still ticking

[sunking2]

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

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:easy?

[TheRaven64]

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.

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:easy?

[generica1]

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.