IPv6

Alpha (Feature Flag)	Beta
kOps 1.23	kOps 1.26

kOps has beta support for configuring clusters with IPv6-only pods and IPv6-only or dual-stack nodes.

IPv6 mode is specified by setting nonMasqueradeCIDR: "::/0" in the cluster spec. The --ipv6 flag of kops create cluster sets this field, among others.

Cloud providers

kOps currently supports IPv6 on AWS only.

IPv6 requires the external Cloud Controller Manager.

VPC, subnets, and topology

The VPC can be either shared or managed by kOps. If shared, it must have an IPv6 pool associated.

Subnet IPv6 CIDR allocations may be specified in the cluster spec using the special syntax /LEN#N, where "LEN" is the prefix length and "N" is the hexadecimal sequence number of the CIDR within the VPC's IPv6 CIDR. For example, if the VPC's CIDR is 2001:db8::/56 then the syntax /64#a would mean 2001:db8:0:a/64.

Public and utility subnets are expected to be dual-stack. Subnets of type Private are expected to be IPv6-only. There is a new type of subnet DualStack which is like Private but is dual-stack. The DualStack subnets are used by default for the control plane and APIServer nodes.

IPv6-only subnets require Kubernetes 1.22 or later. For this reason, private topology on an IPv6 cluster also requires Kubernetes 1.22 or later.

Routing and NAT64

Managed private and public subnets which have IPv6CIDR assignments route 64:ff9b::/96 (NAT64) to whatever is specified in the egress field of the subnet's spec, defaulting the availability zone's NAT Gateway.

If a NAT Gateway is thus needed by a managed public subnet and there are no utility subnets in that availability zone, the NAT Gateway will be placed in the first-listed public subnet in that zone.

The managed private subnets route the rest of outbound IPv6 traffic to the VPC's Egress-only Internet Gateway. The managed public subnets route the rest of outbound IPv6 traffic to the VPC's Internet Gateway.

Distributions

As Debian, as of Debian 11, does not support IPv6-only instances, kOps does not support IPv6 on Debian.

CNI

kOps currently supports IPv6 on Calico, Cilium, and bring-your-own CNI only.

CNIs must not masquerade IPv6 addresses.

Calico

Running IPv6 with Calico requires a Ubuntu 22.04 or Flatcar based AMI.