Application Load Balancer and Network Load Balancer end-to-end IPv6 support

Application Load Balancers and Network Load Balancers now support end-to-end connectivity with Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Clients can now connect to application and network load balancers and access backend applications over IPv6.

With this launch, you can set your load balancer to “dual stack” mode, allowing it to accept both IPv4 or IPv6 client connections. While dual stack mode on internet-facing load balancers has been available, this launch extends support for internal load balancers by adding protections to help prevent unintended internet access via IPv6 through an internet gateway.

Additionally, application and network load balancers now support load balancing to targets addressed by IPv6. With this launch, you can now create IPv6 target groups, allowing IPv4 and IPv6 clients to connect to targets in IPv6/dual-stack subnets. Similar to IPv4, Network Load Balancers can preserve the source IP addresses of IPv6 clients connecting to IPv6 target groups and Application Load Balancers deliver the client IP in an HTTP header.

IPv6 support on Application Load Balancers and Network Load Balancers is available in all AWS commercial and GovCloud (US) Regions. To get started, enable IPv6 for your VPC, register IPv6 targets into a new IPv6 type target group, and select “dualstack” as the IP address type on the load balancers.

To learn more, please refer to the ALB documentation and the NLB documentation.