Re: [v6ops] About Req for Comments - "Transition to IPv6"

[Owen DeLong <[e-mail]>]

> On Mar 16, 2020, at 13:40 , Alexandre Petrescu <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Le 16/03/2020 à 20:42, Owen DeLong a écrit :
>> 
>> 
>>> On Mar 16, 2020, at 04:03 , Alexandre Petrescu <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
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>>> 
>>> 
>>> Le 16/03/2020 à 08:05, Owen DeLong a écrit :
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Mar 15, 2020, at 16:32 , Matthew Petach <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 11:54 AM Owen DeLong <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>>>>> > On Mar 5, 2020, at 8:51 AM, Alexandre Petrescu <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>>>>> > Is facebook a network?  I thought of it like a server farm.
>>>>> 
>>>>> How does one run a distributed server farm throughout the world without connecting it with a network? Am I missing something?
>>>>> 
>>>>> I believe for a very long time, that would have accurately described Akamai.
>>>> 
>>>> Akamai didn’t run a backbone. I’d argue that they did run many rather sizable networks.
>>>> 
>>>>> Until their announcement, long after they had established themselves in the marketplace, that they were going to deploy a network: https://pc.nanog.org/static/published/meetings/NANOG71/1532/20171003_Kaufmann_Lightning_Talk_Akamai_v1.pdf <https://pc.nanog.org/static/published/meetings/NANOG71/1532/20171003_Kaufmann_Lightning_Talk_Akamai_v1.pdf>
>>>> Oh, I’m very familiar with that particular project… It was in it’s startup hey day during my tenure in Mr. Kaufmann’s group. That was Akamai building a backbone to connect many (not nearly all) of their networks together.
>>>> 
>>>> I stand by my original statement. One cannot (usefully) run a server farm without a network. Network != backbone.
>>> 
>>> I agree a server farm needs a network.  But that network might be a switched Ethernet with VLANs in a large building, or it might be made of long haul links (ATM, FDDI, multi-Gigabit Ethernet fiber).
>>> 
>>> In the first case (call it VLAN) it is highly possible that VLAN in a building, or a set of close by buildings, are IPv6 only, and no IPv4.
>>> 
>> 
>> This is just silly… For the server farm to be useful, that “VLAN” still needs a larger network in front of it that eventually makes contact (ideally in multiple diverse ways) with a larger internet.
>>> 
>>> But if the facebook system is a geographically distributed server farm with a large network, it might be that at some point the data is carried on IPv4 even though it is IPv6 over IPv4.
>>> 
>> In talking to Facebook’s engineers, they claim to do v4<->6 translation at the edge where necessary to talk to IPv4-only clients and are IPv6-only throughout their datacenters and other networks.
> 
> that v4<->v6 means facebook network is not IPv6-only
> 

No, it doesn’t. A few translation gateways at the very edge of the network are precisely what allows the network itself to be IPv6-only.

Owen