At the core of all modern internet technology is a complex system of routing information from one point to another. This routing system operates largely in the background of most technology organizations but has tremendous impact on the business objectives of a company.

A commonly debated topic among the networking community is the transition from the older IPv4 technology to the new IPv6 system that offers far more unique addresses and security features. Many take this routing system for granted, and that is exactly what Shannon McFarland, distinguished engineer at Cisco Systems Inc., strives to achieve.

“The beauty of what we’re trying to accomplish with a real IPv6 deployment is that the user shouldn’t have to know which protocol their running on; they should just have the same experience that the application developer intended,” McFarland said.

He spoke to host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during OpenStack Summit in Boston, Massachusetts.  (*Disclosure below.)

IPv6 adoption in private cloud seeing rapid uptick

While established public cloud providers are seeing modest shifts from IPv4 to IPv6, the private cloud environment is seeing a rapid uptick in IPv6 adoption. “We spend a lot of time on the OpenStack side, especially in the private cloud environment where people are absolutely moving to IPv6 in a pretty rapid fashion,” McFarland said.

With custom-build private clouds, information technology departments are presented with the opportunity to build their infrastructure from scratch, including the communication protocol. “IPv6 in a hybrid environment has absolutely become top of mind versus ‘we’ll do this first, and then we’ll do IPv6 later,'” he stated.

Troyer brought up the question of ease of use and asked if IPv6 is built into most of the stack at this point. McFarland pointed out a bifurcation in deployment status between application layers. “Right now the vast majority of the deployments, especially in the enterprise space, have really been tenant-facing, what I call the data plane of the cloud … less so in the actual operation or the control plane of the cloud,” McFarland explained.

Now that OpenStack has matured into a stable technology, Miniman asked what is next for IPv6 development in the OpenStack ecosystem. McFarland pointed to a customer driven roadmap. “What is it that the customers are still feeling from a friction in deployment? The goal moving forward is making sure that the control plane, the databases, the API endpoints and those types of things have IPv6 support,” he said.

McFarland went on to reflect a sentiment shared by many regarding the future of OpenStack technology as a whole. “We need to also understand as an entire community what people are doing with OpenStack, or want to do with OpenStack. When we understand what their use cases are, we can bolt on any additional support that IPv6 might be able to help with down that road,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of OpenStack Summit 2017 Boston. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this OpenStack Summit segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Cisco Systems nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE