Hot on the heels of the IPv6 news earlier this week about Facebook and Akamai, is the announcement from Amazon that their S3 service is now accessible over IPv6 via dual-stack endpoints. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides online file storage through web interfaces including REST, SOAP and HTTP GET, as well as with BitTorrent.
In order to access S3 buckets (file repositories) via IPv6, it’s as straightforward as switching to new dual-stack endpoints such as:
http://BUCKET.s3.dualstack.REGION.amazonaws.comor
http://s3.dualstack.REGION.amazonaws.com/BUCKETFor those using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) or the AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell, it’s possible to use the --enabledualstack flag to switch to the dual-stack endpoints. The AWS SDKs are currently being updated to support the use_dualstack_endpoint setting and are expected to be available this week.
When a DNS lookup is performed on these endpoints, it returns a ‘AAAA’ record with an IPv6 address, as well as an ‘A’ record with an IPv4 address. If the network stack in the client is configured to prefer AAAA records, a connection will be made using the IPv6 address.
IPv6 support is currently available for all S3 features with the exception of Website Hosting, S3 Transfer Acceleration and access via BitTorrent. It is also available in all commercial AWS Regions and in AWS GovCloud (US), with the exception of China.
For more information, please see the Amazon S3 website.
If you’re still thinking of moving to IPv6, please take a look at our Start Here page to understand how you can get started.