The rest of this article will assume that you know why the Internet needs to evolve from IPv4 to IPv6. If you do not understand this, please stop reading and view this Youtube video of Vinton Cerf explaining the rationale behind the protocol migration (Cerf is considered one of the “fathers of the Internet”).
The death of IPv4 as a relevant networking protocol was delayed considerably by the deployment of two addressing-related solutions: Network Address Translation (NAT) and Classless InterDomain Routing (CIDR). However, given the current and projected growth in human population and the ever expanding quantity of devices connecting to the Internet, IPv6 is required to accommodate and sustain the necessary expansion of Internet availability and services. For example, two well-known technology growth sectors, mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) and cloud-based computing, require public IPv4 connectivity to function and therefore, they are contributing to the exhaustion of the public IPv4 address space (even with NAT relieving some pressure).