News

Free allocation of entire IPv6 ranges

One of the advantages of IPv6 is that there are more than enough IPv6 addresses available for every conceivable application. So why not use a separate IPv6 address for each service, customer or project? With our new Floating Networks you can now assign your servers their own "/56" address range. The new IPv6 Floating Networks are free of charge for you – as are the individual IPv6 addresses already available.

Similar to Floating IPs, Floating Networks can be assigned to another server at any time as well. No matter whether you are planning maintenance work or have a hot standby system ready for all cases: With a mouse click or an API call, you can assign the entire address range to another server within seconds, which can then transparently take all requests.

Central stateful firewall without NAT

NAT (Network Address Translation), often used to hide many private IP addresses behind a public IP, has become widespread, especially due to the scarcity of IPv4 addresses – despite a number of disadvantages. IPv6 promises to return to "end-to-end connectivity": source and target systems can address each other directly and unambiguously.

This is precisely why a central firewall that filters incoming connections remains an important component of most security architectures. With cloudscale.ch, such a setup can now be implemented easily:
Create a server with a "public" and a "private network interface" and, in a second step, assign a Floating Network to it – this server is your central firewall. The traffic filtered by the firewall will be forwarded to connected servers via the private network interface. Now you need to configure individual, unique IPv6 addresses from the Floating Network on all these private network interfaces. This allows your servers to be reached via these IPv6 addresses, while you can easily and centrally control traffic on your firewall.

The following diagram illustrates the setup:

                             +-------------+
                             |  Internet   |
                             +------+------+
                                    |
                             +------+------+
                             |  Server 1   |
                             |  "Firewall" |
                             +------+------+
                                    |
       +-----------------+----------+------+---------------------+
       |                 |                 |                     |
+------+------+   +------+------+   +------+------+       +------+------+
|  Server 2   |   |  Server 3   |   |  Server 4   |  ...  |  Server N   |
+-------------+   +-------------+   +-------------+       +-------------+

Migration of your IP space to cloudscale.ch

Many companies already use their own IP addresses, which have been assigned to them in the form of "Provider Independent Space" (PI Space) or in their role as "Local Internet Registry" (LIR). Thanks to Floating Networks it is now also possible to move such IP addresses (both IPv4 and IPv6) to cloudscale.ch. Keep your well-established IP addresses, but spare the effort of having your own physical infrastructure and take advantage of the flexibility of our Swiss cloud instead. Contact us to learn more about the possibilities of such a setup.

Leverage the full potential of IPv6 with our new Floating Networks today and benefit from the same flexibility that we have already introduced with Floating IPs. With our new Floating Networks, you can adapt the network to your individual requirements – or even use your own existing IP addresses.

Ready for your next hop,
your cloudscale.ch team