Deploy360 12 September 2014

Facebook Launches IPv6-Only Data Cluster

By Dan YorkDirector, Internet Technology

If you are a Facebook user and are also interested in using IPv6 wherever possible, Facebook’s Paul Saab just announced yesterday that there is now a special link where you can connect to Facebook’s IPv6-ONLY data cluster. In the IPv6 group on Facebook (of course!) he posted:

Back in March I announced we were working towards having IPv6-only clusters. I’m happy to announce that we’ve successfully launched our latest cluster as IPv6-only. If you want to make sure that you’re using the IPv6-only cluster, we’ve redirected traffic for http://www.v6.facebook.com/ so that it uses it

Just to be 100% clear, you have been able to access Facebook over IPv6 ever since World IPv6 Launch back in 2012 just by going to the regular http://www.facebook.com/ URL.  Users of the IPvFoo/IPvFox browser add-ons have been able to see that we’ve been connecting to Facebook over IPv6.  It’s all worked great.

However, while the connection to the main Facebook page has been over IPv6, that page has also still required some connections over the legacy IPv4 network.

With yesterday’s news from Paul Saab, those of us who want to truly do everything over IPv6 can now do so by connecting to http://www.v6.facebook.com/. Admittedly, this may only be of interest to those of us who are advocates of IPv6, but still, it’s pretty cool to have full access to a major site like Facebook entirely over IPv6!

You may recall that back in March, Paul Saab gave an excellent presentation about how Facebook is moving to entirely using IPv6 within their internal networks.

fb-internal-ipv6

 

His slides are available and you’ll note that on his second to last slide he wrote:

  • Plans for first IPv6 only cluster (no RFC1918) by end of 2014

This news yesterday is the completion of those plans (and well before the end of 2014, too!).

Kudos to Paul and his team at Facebook – it’s great to see this work happening and to have a way we can work with Facebook in pure IPv6-only network. Thanks!

What are you waiting for?  Visit our “Start Here” page to find resources available to help you make the move to IPv6 – and let us know if there is anything more we can do to help you!

Disclaimer: Viewpoints expressed in this post are those of the author and may or may not reflect official Internet Society positions.

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