Amazon VPC CNI now supports IPv6 Egress for Pods in IPv4 enabled Kubernetes Clusters

Starting with Amazon VPC CNI version 1.13, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) allows clusters in IPv4 address space to connect with end points in IPv6 address space. This enables customers to operate services in mixed IPv4 and IPv6 environments while migrating to IPv6 only address space-based services. The native support in Amazon VPC CNI reduces the overhead of managing dual-stack cluster configurations and alleviates operational challenges in maintaining application compatibility with dual-stack networking.

Kubernetes cluster administrators often have to operate in environments where IPv6 and IPv4 networks coexist. They need to provide ability for legacy IPv4 endpoints to connect to services running on IPv6 clusters and vice versa. With EKS support for IPv6, EKS already supports egress-only IPv4 in the Amazon VPC CNI plugin. With this launch, pods in IPv4 clusters can communicate with IPv6 endpoints without additional components such as dual-stack application load balancer or network address translators. Additionally, native support for IPv6 egress in Amazon VPC CNI reduces the operational overhead for network engineers to maintain complex traffic routing configurations to operate services across IPv4 and IPv6 address spaces as well as reliance on other third-party plugins.

Amazon VPC CNI support for IPv6 egress is available in all regions where Amazon EKS operates. To get started, visit the Amazon EKS documentation.