The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods IPB190: IPv6 in Kubernetes Deployments
Dec 18, 2025
Wim Hendricks, the CTO of Nokia's IP division, brings three decades of experience in networking to the conversation. He delves into the benefits and challenges of utilizing IPv6 in Kubernetes, revealing its pivotal roles in the control and data planes. The discussion highlights the surprisingly low adoption rates, the need for dual-stack support, and the hurdles posed by non-IPv6-aware applications. Wim also emphasizes the abundance of IPv6 addresses for scaling and the importance of ecosystem improvements for a smoother deployment process.
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IPv6 Runs In Both Control And Data Planes
- Kubernetes uses IPv6 in both control plane and data plane, assigning IPv6 to nodes, pods, and services from configured pools.
- You can choose IPv6-only, IPv4-only, or dual-stack at installation time, affecting orchestration and workload networking.
Dual-Stack Is Supported But Rarely Enabled
- Dual-stack IPv6 support became official in Kubernetes 1.23, but most distributions still do not enable IPv6 by default.
- Adoption in production clusters is low; Wim estimated roughly 10% of deployments use IPv6.
Enable IPv6 During Cluster Install
- Enable IPv6 (or dual-stack) at cluster installation because turning it on later is generally not supported by distributions.
- Check your distribution's defaults and configuration files before deploying to avoid needing a redeploy.