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I am going to be reserving a cloud server instance. If I am simply pulling data from a websocket and communicating with a normal REST api, does an instance type not supporting IPv6 have any implications? I'm looking at Alibaba Cloud and some of their instances are tagged with "not IPv6-supported".

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  • What are the clients that will pull data from it? Will they always have IPv4?
    – Gordon Davisson
    Jan 17, 2020 at 20:49
  • @GordonDavisson I'll be pulling data and communicating with (through websocket/REST) an external website. I have no idea if they will always have IPv4. How do I figure that out? I have the websocket and REST URI, can I use that?
    – JacksonCounty
    Jan 18, 2020 at 8:55
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    APIs don't matter, it's all about whether the computers communicating can agree on an IP version. If you have a web server running on an IPv4-only host (or VM), it won't be able to reach a backend that's on an IPv6-only host (/VM).
    – Gordon Davisson
    Jan 18, 2020 at 9:51

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I think that you should understand the role of IPv6 first because your applications normally will not depend on it. It's mostly related to the communications between the devices on the internet. Some people don't consider IPv6 during their implementation because it's also a new notion for them that they don't understand properly.

You can check this article on Alibaba blog to see more about IPv6

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In simple terms, "not IPv6-supported" means, the instance will not be able to communicate over ipv6, which is an upgraded version of the current ipv4 protocol. There is still a long way to go till you would be communicating over ipv6 only. If you are looking to just use the instance for normal api use, it will not matter.

Unless you will be pulling any data from ipv6 only clients or someone using only ipv6 protocol will be pulling data from your instance, this will not matter. Most infrastructure uses dual stack, which means they would be both ipv4 and ipv6 compatible.

For example:

Google ipv4 DNS : 8.8.8.8

Google ipv6 DNS : 2001:4860:4860::8888

This is the difference between both protocols, so if you want to ask someone who will be using your API/instance to pull data, you may ask them by either mentioning ipv4 and ipv6 or sending these two types of IPs.

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