AWS Gateway Load Balancer and Gateway Load Balancer endpoint now support IPv6 traffic

AWS Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) and Gateway Load Balancer Endpoint (GWLBE) now support end-to-end connectivity using Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Customers can now send IPv6 traffic through Gateway Load Balancers and its endpoints to distribute traffic flows to dual stack appliance targets.

With this launch, you can now set your existing or new GWLB to dual-stack mode, allowing it to accept and load balance both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic flows. You can then configure your GWLB target group to either use subnets that support IPv4 targets only or dual stack subnets that support both IPv4 and IPv6 targets. GWLB exchanges IPv6 traffic with the target appliances using IPv4 Geneve encapsulation, allowing target appliances to work in both IPv4 and IPv6. To get started, enable IPv6 for your VPC, select “dualstack” as the IP address type on the GWLB, and register dual stack targets into the GWLB target group.

This launch also includes IPv6 support for GWLBEs. On existing endpoints, you can now route IPv6 traffic by upgrading your existing IPv4-based GWLBEs to using dual-stack subnets. For routing IPv6 traffic to new endpoints, you can either provision dual-stack subnets or create IPv6-only subnets that will require updates to your VPCs’ IPv6 route tables.

You can configure this feature on new and existing GWLBs or GWLBEs using the API or the AWS Console. There is no additional charge for using these features. IPv6 support is available in all commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Please refer to GWLB IPv6 Launch Blog, GWLB Documentation and GWLBE Documentation for details.