Announcing Limited Availability for IPv6

We are pleased to announce that IPv6 is in Limited Availability. If you’d like to participate, please email support@fastly.com to get started (we will be enabling customers in batches). Our team will follow up with simple instructions on how to make sure your account is enabled for IPv6.

Performance, including both speed and scalability, is one of our core tenets at Fastly – the drive to help our customers achieve the best performance possible continues to inform our roadmap and inspire technical innovation. IPv6, the next generation of IP addressing identification and location, is a crucial step in that evolution that touches upon both of those core items of performance.

IPv6 also impacts:

• Speed: Facebook found that users’ News Feeds loaded 20-40% faster on mobile devices using IPv6 (one of the key reasons is the removal of carrier-NAT’ing in mobile networks, which can add a tremendous amount of latency).

• Scalability: it’s a known fact we are running out of IPv4 addresses — one of the primary design goals of IPv6 was to make address depletion a thing of the past. IPv6 theoretically has such vast address space (to the tune of 3.4×10^38, or 340 undecillion addresses) that we should never have to worry about exhaustion.  

While IPv6 adoption was initially slow to ramp up, it now represents over 10% of global internet traffic, and an ever higher 30% in the United States. Furthermore, Apple has announced that all mobile applications must support an IPv6-only network, and IPv6 represents 80% of mobile traffic.

IPv6 will be in General Availability later this quarter. Until then, we look forward to your feedback. Network Systems Engineer João Taveira will discuss our road to IPv6 in a series of blog posts, as well as at Altitude, our customer summit. Customers are invited to attend — you can register here.