I recently attended training on Google Cloud Platform to become a Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect. During the training I learned that GCP does not support IPv6 natively on Compute Engine instances. I have been using IPv6 at home for years and I know that Google has been supporting IPv6 on its search engine for the same amount of time, so the lack of support was disappointing. The solution for IPv6 on GCP is to implement a public facing load balancer which will expose an IPv6 address to the Internet and NAT that address to the internal RFC1918 private IPv4 address. Although this is a valid short term option when migrating to IPv6, one of the great benefits of implementing IPv6 is to eradicate NAT from the world, so hopefully this situation is only temporary and in the future native end to end IPv6 will be supported on GCP. In the mean time, since we need to live with this solution, I thought it would be worth while to test it and see how it works.
So that I was not just doing a basic protocol test, I decided to use WordPress as the target application. This would allow for more robust testing of the solution and had the advantage of allowing me to practice what I had learned in training on something more than just a basic Apache server. Another advantage is that this test would allow me to evaluate if I should move this Blog to GCP and make it IPv6 capable, since at the moment it is not.
With this in mind, I will publish a series of posts covering the steps I am following to get WordPress running on IPv6. Not all of the steps are directly related to IPv6, but are necessary when setting up a load balanced service in GCP. Along the way I will share experiences and tips which might prove helpful for future installations.
In the first step, I will setup a reusable Compute Engine image with a LAMP stack and WordPress. Using the WordPress Image I will then setup the load balancer with an IPv6 address. Finally, I will test using a native IPv6 host. The diagram below shows an overview of the design:
