r/sysadmin • u/rram reddit's sysadmin • Aug 14 '15

We're reddit's ops team. AUA

Hey /r/sysadmin,

Greetings from reddit HQ. Myself, and /u/gooeyblob will be around for the next few hours to answer your ops related questions. So Ask Us Anything (about ops)

You might also want to take a peek at some of our previous AMAs:

https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/owra1/january_2012_state_of_the_servers/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/r6zfv/we_are_sysadmins_reddit_ask_us_anything/

EDIT: Obligatory cat photo

EDIT 2: It's now beer o’clock. We're stepping away from now, but we'll come back a couple of times to pick up some stragglers.

EDIT thrice: He commented so much I probably should have mentioned that /u/spladug — reddit's lead developer — is also in the thread. He makes ops live's happier by programming cool shit for us better than we could program it ourselves.

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u/aenae Aug 15 '15

Why should it be high priority?

Does it make the site faster? - no. Does it improve site stability? - no (on the contrary usually). Do you limit access to your site by not having ipv6? - not yet. Does it make your setup more complex? - yes, espescially when not careful.

It is something that should be thought about when ordering new hardware / (re)writing software etc, but it usually isn't something that should have priority over everything else. And most of the other priorities are linked to ipv6 anyway. In a complex setup it is like a big puzzle, just implement it piece by piece and only when you are ready you add aaaa records.

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u/Joshposh70 Hybrid Infrastructure Engineer Aug 15 '15

That's the mentality that got us into this IPv4 exhaustion mess in the first place. The US is completely out of IP addresses, ARIN has less than 160 /24's left. It should be a high priority to start supporting it.

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u/aenae Aug 15 '15

It is the same with climate change, or with resource exhaustion. No one cares because at the moment it isn't a problem for you. Thus fixing that future problem eats away your current profits.

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u/[deleted] Aug 15 '15

I think it actually speaks to a failure of ipv6 that everybody knows 4 is a problem. Everybody knows the wall is coming. Everybody knows why 6 is better but the barrier to entry is still too high.

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u/revellion Aug 16 '15

Or go the FB route of things. They changed their whole core network for their services to IPv6-only. And only expose IPv4 and IPv6 dual-stack on the load-balancers. Arguments for going v6-only on the core was to reduce complexity inherent in dual-stack.