Amazon EKS now supports Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports IPv6, enabling customers to scale containerized applications on Kubernetes far beyond limits of private IPv4 address space, while achieving high network bandwidth with minimal complexity.

Kubernetes uses a flat networking model that requires each pod to receive an IP address. This simplified approach enables low-friction porting of applications from virtual machines to containers, but requires a significant amount of IP addresses that many private IPv4 networks are not equipped to handle. Further, clusters running in IPv4 based networks require complex network routing configuration to enable pod communication with internet services.

With EKS support for IPv6, pods are assigned only a globally routable IPv6 address, and you easily scale applications in your cluster without consuming limited private IPv4 address space. This globally routable IPv6 address can be used to directly communicate with any IPv6 endpoint in your Amazon VPC, on-premises network, or the public internet. IPv6 support is enabled through the Amazon VPC CNI plugin, which directly integrates with the EC2 networking stack to deliver high performance and reliability. With native VPC integration, you can secure your applications using standard components including egress-only internet gateways, security groups, and network access control lists (ACL). EKS configures networking so that pods can still communicate with IPv4 based endpoints outside the cluster, enabling you to adopt the benefits of IPv6 and Kubernetes without requiring that all dependent services deployed across your organization are first migrated to IPv6.

To get started, visit the Amazon EKS documentation. To learn more, check out the AWS News launch blog.