The Journey to IPv6 on Amazon EKS: Foundation (Part 1)

This article discusses the journey to enabling IPv6 support on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters. It provides an overview of the challenges with IPv4 address exhaustion and the need for adopting IPv6 to scale Kubernetes networking.

Specifically, the article covers:

• The challenges of IPv4 address space limitations and the need for IPv6 adoption in Kubernetes clusters.
• The key tenets of Amazon EKS's approach to supporting IPv6, such as enabling native Pod-to-Pod IPv6 communication, seamless IPv4 and IPv6 interoperability, and avoiding IPv4 address exhaustion.
• The foundation of deploying an Amazon EKS IPv6 cluster, which involves creating a dual-stack Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and deploying the Amazon EKS control plane and data plane with IPv6 support.
• The details of how Amazon EKS assigns IPv6 addresses to Pods and services, and how it enables egress to the internet and ingress connectivity using Network Load Balancers (NLBs) and Application Load Balancers (ALBs).
• Conclusion: Encourages readers to adopt Amazon EKS IPv6 clusters to address IPv4 address space limitations and provides a link to a Terraform blueprint for deploying an Amazon EKS IPv6 cluster.