Within AWS' Virtual Private Clouds, applications bound by the limited amount of the IPv4 address space can now transition to an IPv6-only environment.

Amazon Web Services has added IPv6-only subnet capability, which can accommodate workloads that require more IP addresses than IPv4 can supply.

According to a blog post by AWS's Rohit Aswani, a senior specialized solutions architect, and Aditya Santhanam, a senior product manager, the service is offered through Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and is appropriate for workloads such as serverless and container applications.

"Workloads that are hindered by the limited size of the IPv4 address space can now scale up on AWS by migrating to an IPv6-only environment," they stated.

"In addition, users will be able to meet the requirements for adoption of IPv6-only network environments stipulated by US federal government agencies with this launch, reducing the need for translation software or systems and resulting in a simplified IPv6-only architecture."

All-IPv6 subnets are formed within Amazon VPCs that support both IPv4 and IPv6, and they can be used to build AWS Nitro System-based Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Nitro is hardware and software developed by AWS to improve performance, availability, and security.

According to Aswani and Santhanam, the service allows installations to scale without requiring any IPv4 addressing in the subnet because the pool of IPv6 addresses available is around 18 quintillion.

AWS also made it easy to accommodate applications that use both IPv4 and IPv6. Users can set their AWS load balancers to dual-stack mode, allowing them to accept both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic, according to the company.