Celebrating World IPv6 Launch Day (And Six Years of IPv6) at LinkedIn

It has been seven years since the World IPv6 Day (Aug. 6, 2011), which was the first large-scale test of IPv6 for 24 hours on major internet web sites, and it has been six years since the World IPv6 Launch Day on June 6, 2012, which got many sites to definitively offer their services over IPv6. With the Internet Society, LinkedIn is celebrating the anniversary of World IPv6 Launch Day this year on June 6, 2018. We're reflecting on the work we have done so far at LinkedIn in deploying IPv6.

We started to add IPv6 on our backbone in 2011, and by 2013, our emails could be sent and received over IPv6. In 2014, we started to serve our site to our members over IPv6. We have enabled dual stack support on our CDNs, sharing our experience and our methodology for measuring performance. We’ve made supporting IPv6 a hard requirement for any prospective CDNs going forward.

Since we enabled IPv6 on our site, the growth of IPv6 has been constant, and it is now reaching some significant levels. For instance, in 2017, we saw for the first time that there were more mobiles devices in the U.S. reaching our site over IPv6 than IPv4.

While we have strengthened our public visibility over IPv6, we've started in the last few years the transformation to bring IPv6 to all devices internally, for instance in our offices, in our data centers, and in our Points of Presence (PoPs).

Over the last year, we have seen more and more devices reaching our site over IPv6, and we see significant growth in many countries:

IPv6day2

The IPv6 percentage is averaged over a seven-day sliding window, as we notice large changes over the weekends in many countries. This seems to indicate that there are more IPv6 deployments at home or on mobile networks than in enterprise. For instance, in the U.S. we now pass 50% IPv6 usage on weekends across all devices, as shown in the graph below:

IPv6day3

For the LinkedIn internal network, the IPv6 road continues to have many milestones ahead of it, even as we look back at our accomplishments so far. Dual stack is standard across all of our network, from our data centers all the way down to the local wired and wireless networks at our offices. In the data centers, while not all our servers have dual stack yet, we have reached close to 50% across the board, and we are continuing deployment until we can start to retire IPv4. Reaching this point was a broad exercise in collaboration to successfully meet the first pass of internal and external expectations, but in many ways, our greatest efforts still lie ahead of us.