Archive for the ‘GCP’ Category

Google have now joined Amazon and Microsoft in adding IPv6 support to their cloud platform. However, the service is not a native IPv6 offering. Both EC2 and Azure provide native IPv6 to VMs. In contrast, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) only supports IPv6 on load balancers.

At the moment GCP IPv6 support is an “Alpha trial”. So it remains to be seen when it will become a production service and when Google will eventually deliver a native IPv6 service on GCP.

The leading cloud providers have been slow to provide native IPv6 support. It is only recently that Amazon and Microsoft have enabled native IPv6 support in EC2 and Azure. Even so, Microsoft’s native support has limitations; address translation at the edge (NPTv6), no connectivity between VMs and an inability to add IPv6 to existing VMs.

It hoped that Google’s trial will lead to a production service fairly soon but it is unclear when Google plans to deliver a native IPv6 service.