Posted On: Nov 6, 2020

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports native Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) for Amazon ECS tasks using task networking (amazonvpc networking mode) in addition to this already being supported in host networking mode. With this capability, tasks using amazonvpc networking mode can communicate with other endpoints in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and internet in dual-stack mode via either IPv4 or IPv6. This will allow customers to communicate with on-premises resources that support only IPv6 addresses and meet IPv6 compliance requirements.  

Amazon VPC that operates in a dual-stack mode can now assign a globally routable IPv6 address, in addition to the private IPv4 and link-local IPv6 addresses, to Amazon ECS tasks using amazonvpc networking mode running on both Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Fargate. This globally routable IPv6 address can be used to communicate with any IPv6 endpoint in your Amazon VPC, on-premises network, or the internet. Once your Amazon VPC and subnets are enabled for dual-stack mode, you do not need to specify any additional settings when creating a new Amazon ECS service or running a task manually as Amazon ECS will launch tasks using the default setting on the subnets. With IPv6 enabled, applications can be secured in the same easy manner available today for IPv4 through security groups, network access control lists (ACLs), and route tables. 

IPv6 support in amazonvpc networking mode is available in all regions where Amazon ECS is available. Additionally, support is included with the latest Container Networking Interface (CNI) plugins and ECS Agent version 1.45.0 or later if using Amazon ECS on EC2 (available in all Linux variants of the Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI)), and Platform Version (PV) 1.4 or later if using Amazon ECS on Fargate. To learn more, visit our documentation