On 19 September 2024, Backblaze network engineers published a blog post announcing support for IPv6 in their online cloud storage service. It was posted to Hacker News and there’s quite a good discussion online there too.
The product model here is secure and reliable cloud data storage. It’s designed to be API compatible with the Amazon S3 cloud object model, as well as providing its own native API. And, because of the way they have to balance storage demands by location, size, and demand, there is a fair amount of traffic engineering going on behind the scenes.
As the post explains, there isn’t any visible change on the public front end of their services, so a user could choose to ignore this uplift to IPv6 and have no concerns. However, managing a large data centre footprint in IPv4 has meant increasing the use of private IPs and therefore Network Address Translation (NAT)-based packet processing. With the introduction of IPv6, this NAT component can be simplified out of the equation, while retaining their virtual IPnetwork model.
It’s an interesting read, with good explanations of their network architecture. Backblaze notes they still have work to do so we hope to circle back with a more in-depth look at their deployment in future. For now, read their IPv6 announcement post and see what you think!
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