Question

Is it possible to enable IPv6 on DOKS Loadbalancers?

Posted on February 20, 2023
DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes IPv6 Networking Kubernetes
Asked by Hidde Jansen

My current cloud provider offers a load balancer solution that accepts both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic. It has operating modes that allow HTTP(S) traffic to be forwarded from either incoming protocols (both v4 and v6), to the respective v4 or v6 address, or forwarding it to one or the other. (that is, forwarding incoming IPv6 traffic to IPv4 on the backend, or vice versa)

I’m preparing to migrate some of the services I’ve got running there, to a DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes cluster. My Deployment has a Service and I’ve created an Ingress to expose this to the outside world. (using ingress-nginx) This has created a load balancer in the cluster, and I am able to access the Service over IPv4. However, I’m noticing that this load balancer was created with an IPv4 address only. I’m unable to find any IPv6 address for this load balancer in the DigitalOcean control panel or via kubectl, but I would like to be able to accept IPv6 traffic on these services.

So my question is, would it be possible to enable IPv6 for an Ingress / DOKS load balancer? And if yes, how do I do that?

I read something about dual-stack networking on the official Kubernetes documentation, but I’m not sure if that applies here. I must admit, networking isn’t my strong suit, so any help is appreciated!

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• February 21, 2023

Accepted Answer

Hey @hiddejansen,

At the moment Load balancers do not support IPv6. For more information about the limits, you can take a look at the following page:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/networking/load-balancers/details/limits/

It looks like someone has had the same idea before and has posted it on our Product Ideas board. The best thing to do would be to head over and add your vote to it, as well as adding any additional information in the comments for exactly what you’d like to see implemented: