Alibaba Cloud’s Comprehensive IPv6 Support: Background, Product Overview, and Use Cases

Alibaba Cloud announced full IPv6 support on June 20, covering compute, storage, networking, database, security, and CDN services. The move aligns with national policies, growing market demand, and the rise of 5G, IoT, and App Store IPv6 requirements, marking the start of large‑scale IPv6 deployment.

The public‑facing products now support IPv6, including Cloud DNS (dual‑stack resolution), CDN, and Server Load Balancer (SLB) with dedicated IPv6 instances that still communicate with backend ECS via IPv4 private addresses. Alibaba also offers an IPv6 conversion service that maps IPv6 traffic to existing IPv4 servers, simplifying migration for on‑premise systems.

Internally, VPC and Elastic Compute Service (ECS) adopt a dual‑stack model, allowing both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. An IPv6 gateway controls outbound and inbound traffic for IPv6 ECS instances, providing flexible bandwidth, billing, and access control.

Additional cloud products such as Object Storage Service (OSS), Relational Database Service (RDS), Data Transmission Service (DTS), API Gateway, and security services have already added or are planning IPv6 support, with a long‑term goal of IPv6‑only operation.

Typical migration scenarios include:

Static content acceleration using dual‑stack DNS + CDN + origin servers (ECS/SLB/OSS).

High‑availability IPv6 systems built with IPv6 SLB, IPv4 ECS, and IPv4 RDS, leveraging IPv4 communication between backend components.

Using the IPv6 conversion service to expose existing IPv4 on‑premise applications to IPv6 users without code changes.

Enabling IPv6 ECS instances to access the Internet via an IPv6 gateway, with configurable rules for outbound traffic.

These solutions illustrate how Alibaba Cloud’s IPv6 capabilities can be combined to facilitate a smooth transition from IPv4 to IPv6 across various workloads.