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I host a static website on Amazon S3 with DNS hosted on Amazon Route 53. I'd like my site to be accessible via IPv4 and IPv6 (because it's about time).

When I use the Route 53 AWS Management Console to add an A (IPv4) "Alias" record for my S3 bucket, I am prompted with the name of my S3 bucket to use as an endpoint. When I try to add an AAAA (IPv6) "Alias" record, I am given no such option:

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Trying to manually set an AAAA record by cloning the existing A record after it was created resulted in an error:

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I know for a fact that the A "Alias" record puts a proper IPv4 IP address into Route 53 DNS:

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I'm afraid to manually set an IPv6 address as I don't think there is any guarantee it will remain. The Alias Target setting is what Amazon prescribes for Static S3 sites.

My question therefore is, does Amazon AWS support accessing S3 Static Websites via IPv6, and if so, how can I set it up?

3 Answers3

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Good news! AWS has support for IPv6 in CloudFront and S3.

AWS currently (2016-04-01) has very limited IPv6 support, only ELBs in EC2 Classic can do IPv6 – and they are being phased out in favour of VPCs.

There is no support for IPv6 in Route53, S3, CloudFront, EC2 nodes or VPC-based load balancers (ELBs).

Many are waiting for AWS to add IPv6 support, myself included. Until then your best choice is probably a different provider that has good IPv6 support.

sandstrom
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    I stopped waiting some time ago and moved out of AWS. – Michael Hampton Sep 07 '15 at 21:55
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    @sandstrom Seems like [CloudFront now has IPv6 support](https://aws.amazon.com/de/about-aws/whats-new/2016/10/ipv6-support-for-cloudfront-waf-and-s3-transfer-acceleration). – tambre Mar 10 '18 at 08:02
  • Except it doesn't support static website hosting. Quote from the linked post: "IPv6 support is available for all S3 features with the **exception of Website Hosting**" – Jerdak Sep 14 '22 at 14:55
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AWS has close to none of IPv6 support. However, if you need it really badly there is an ugly solution - you could use their load balancer in front of your static web site. It supports IPv6 but it may not be ideal or not work at all depending on your situation. Another option would be to consider service like CloudFlare. They will do the translation back and forth for you. The only real solution is move away from AWS to platforms that support IPv6 natively. For instance, RackSpace has decent IPv6 support as well as linode and others.

dtoubelis
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4

Amazon now has support for IPv6 across a range of services.

IPv6 Support for Amazon S3

In order to start accessing your content via IPv6, you need to switch to new dual-stack endpoints that look like this:

https://BUCKET.s3.dualstack.REGION.amazonaws.com

or this:

https://s3.dualstack.REGION.amazonaws.com/BUCKET

Scott
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  • Do you happen to know if there is a "dualstack" endpoint for static websites? They usually look like `www.example.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com` – Ivan Anishchuk Nov 01 '16 at 10:09
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    @IvanAnishchuk I don't think this is supported yet, it's not shown in the documentation and [this thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269278) suggests it's not supported. I guess the only solution at the moment would be to use CloudFront in front of the s3 bucket, and just ensure the caching is set as expected. – Scott Nov 01 '16 at 10:16
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    Yeah, cloudfront can be used. It's just an overkill in my situation, it would only add complexity and charges without many benefits. Cloudflare could probably be used as well. – Ivan Anishchuk Nov 03 '16 at 09:07