Using IPv6 in your EKS cluster

IPv6 has some distinct advantages over IPv4, namely, it provides a much larger address space (this includes public IP addresses), reduces some latency by removing Network Address Translation (NAT) hops, and can simplify the overall routing network configuration. It does have some limitations (not only for EKS but other AWS services as well) so care must be taken when adopting IPv6. Please review https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/ipv6/ and https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/cni-ipv6.html before implementing it in production.

IPv6 cannot currently be enabled on an existing cluster, so the first thing we need to do is create a new cluster with the IPv6 address family, which is at least running Kubernetes 1.21. We will use eksctl with the following configuration file, myipv6cluster.yaml:

---
apiVersion: eksctl.io/v1alpha5
kind: ClusterConfig
metadata:
  name: myipv6cluster
  region: "eu-central-1"
  version...