Friday, December 09, 2022

2022 - Year in review and a look ahead at 2023

 It seems my blogging has fallen off a lot since co-founding HexaBuild and working on IPv6 full time. I wanted to at least get a post out this year talking about some of the interesting things I have observed in the industry and note if I think they will be trends or simple market changes that won't have much impact.

First, regarding IPv6, it appears that IPv6-only design and architecture is accelerating at a rapid pace and I anticipate that will continue into 2023 and 2024. This is driven in part by the White House OMB mandate but also my the cost structure of IPv4 and the open market to obtain IPv4 addresses that have a clean reputation and are available to use immediate. While enterprise organizations will ponder over IPv6 in 2023 and 2024 and potentially kick off projects, they will, for the most part have limited deployments. The exceptions will be organizations that are consuming all their RFC 1918 address space and their public IPv4 address space due to rapid public cloud expansion. This has been a huge driving force around IPv6 discussions to try and help reduce the rate of IPv4 address space consumption. I don't see that changing in 2023 or 2024 but with some organizations repatriating their workloads, it may slow down.

Second, I think automation is the only way to safely adopt IPv6 for larger organizations and they need to invest in tooling, platforms and their staff to make that happen. Given the complexity of dual-stack for many organizations, getting a consistent deployment method that reduces typing/character mistakes is really important for IPv6. Since many organizations are moving that direction already, it is a natural fit and means that automation processes include IPv6 from day one.

Finally, security is becoming interesting again and Zero Trust is changing how team think about deploying and building services. Zero Trust is another natural fit for incorporating IPv6 early on in the process to ensure you can support all your potential network ingress/egress protocols. Thinking through the dual-stack solution and projecting that to IPv6-only allows you to work through many of the corner cases and potential access issues that end clients would run into in the real world.

So, 2023 will likely be a lot of work around IPv6-only, automation, and Zero Trust, is going to be my guess. Of course more cloud, but I think that is just a given going forward. What are everyone else's thoughts about what 2023 will likely consist of for technology focus?

- Ed

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