Amazon ECS announces IPv6-only support

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports running tasks in IPv6-only subnets. With this launch, Amazon ECS tasks and services can run using only IPv6 addresses, without requiring IPv4. This enables customers to deploy containerized applications in IPv6-only environments, scale without being limited by IPv4 address availability, and meet IPv6 compliance requirements through native IPv6 support in Amazon ECS.

Previously, Amazon ECS tasks always required an IPv4 address, even when launched in dual-stack subnets. This requirement could create scaling and management challenges for customers operating large fleets of containerized applications, where IPv4 address space became a bottleneck. With IPv6-only support, Amazon ECS tasks launched in IPv6-only subnets use only IPv6 addresses. This removes IPv4 as a dependency and helps organizations that must meet IPv6 adoption or regulatory mandates.

The feature works across all Amazon ECS launch types and can be used with awsvpc, bridge, and host networking modes. To get started, create IPv6-only subnets in your VPC and launch Amazon ECS services or tasks in those subnets. Amazon ECS automatically detects the configuration and provisions the appropriate networking. To learn more about IPv6-only task networking and supported AWS Regions, see the Amazon ECS task networking documentation for AWS Fargate launch type and EC2 launch type. You can also read our blog post for a detailed walkthrough and migration strategies.