In my previous question with re:post, I was able to configure an EC2 instance with IP6. It was all new to me, but I believe the configurations are now correct. Thank you for that help.
However, while the igw gateway provides for external Internet configurations to the instance, the ports do not open up to the outside world. Therefore, has anyone configured a public website on EC2 using IP6 and no use of a public assigned IP4 address? I can't find any articles on someone having done this.
When I configure another instance on my same AWS account to enable IP6, it can communicate with the first instance over ip6 with wget, ssh, ping6, traceroute6 etc., but from another AWS account, or from my PC over the internet, the network is stated as unreachable.
I have looked closely at the configurations, with Amazon documentation and YouTube tutorials. I have found no articles or YouTube content that shows how to create a website on EC2 with only IP6, where the instance only has a default internal IP4 address, (no elastic ip) and a public IP6 address. The use of NAT is nonviable for this scenario. The use of egw external gateways is not viable either as this is not a private vpc. I should be able to use https://mydomain.com from anywhere on the Internet where the IP6 address is in the Route 53 AAAA DNS record, or even simply use http://[CIDR], or trace6route, and then Amazon translate it to the instance's internal address. I suspect this is not able to happen as translations from IP6 to IP4 may need a public address, which defeats the purpose. I only found one Amazon article with two diagrams that may confirm this is not possible.
I have about 10 website clients who will make a decision about remaining with EC2 instances paying the higher IP4 address costs in 2024, or elect to move to other providers where the IP4 address is free of charge. (Well, who knows if others will eventually charge anyway.) I am waiting to see how much Lightsail will charge for IP4 soon hopefully, but I prefer using Linux 2023 or Debian 11 OS on Amazon EC2 GP3 t4g instances and other benefits from mounted EFS or GP3 disks, S3 buckets etc.
If the general need is to move folks from IP4 to IP6, I assumed there would be an easy way to configure our public websites for IP6. I do have a technical background, but I have not been able to see anything incorrect with my configurations.
Many Thanks,
Laurie
AWS OFFICIALUpdated 2 years ago
Hi. The second AWS instance on my same account that could connect with wget, ping6 and so on, did have IP6 configured. The other AWS account that could not connect, (forgive my memory) I think I did configure IP6 on it as well, but it did not connect.
However, re. the Internet access, for me this is through AussieBroadband (and I tested the Telstra internet) and they had no connection. My Apple iMac does have ip6 enabled, and AussuiBroadband confirmed IP6 traffic is allowed, I also checked my home router which has IP6 traffic allowed. But my home PC uses an IP4 address. I did connection testing with dnschecker.org using the ip6 cidr and all ports would not connect. If connections only work for IP6 to IP6, then general public access to the websites will fail. I guess this is what I'd like to verify. Thanks.
Connections only work for IP6 to IP6 or IP4 to IP4. Therefore, people who want to use IP6 need to consider how their machine communicate with IP4 using machines. Usually, NAT or Tunneling architecture is used. These feature make communication between different IP versions look like that between same IP versions. Like this article, https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/aws-nat64-dns64-communication-ipv6-ipv4-services/?nc1=h_ls.
Thank you everyone. I think I now grasp everyone's clarifications of IP6 to IP6. I do not wish to tackle configurations and costs with NAT. I'll see what pricing Lightsail comes up with for static IP4 address bundled in later this year with the price increases, and will explore the interesting advantages of IP6 to IP6. Happy to say my web clients have this week agreed to pay for the 2024 static IP address pricing. Cheers, Laurie