DNS is one of the vital components of the internet, invisibly making the internet work for everyone for almost four decades. It needs to be rock-solid, in terms of reliability, performance and scalability. PowerDNS has been a huge part of making that happen for the past 20 years. However, DNS is often assumed to be a technology that, although critical infrastructure, is not affected by shifts in technology or business practices, and doesn’t evolve much in terms of features.
Those assumptions have proven to be false, as the world of DNS has been changing hugely over the past few years. For example, the recent move to encrypted DNS changes the landscape significantly. One other driver of the new requirements for DNS installations is the way businesses and consumers now use the internet. IoT devices, streaming services, increased mobile performance and other factors place an ever-higher load on DNS and drive performance expectations. This, in turn, results in a need to push DNS resolvers closer to the edge of the network.
At the same time, a paradigm shift in computing infrastructure is taking place. Firstly, away from physical infrastructure to virtualized infrastructure, and the subsequent deployment of SDN/NFV technologies; and, more recently, the shift from virtualized to cloud-native infrastructure, which is at the heart of the 5G revolution.
PowerDNS is extremely active in addressing the demanding requirements on DNS software that have resulted from this. In the past, all PowerDNS products were shipped with Ansible roles for automated deployment and lifecycle management of all components. In addition, the PowerDNS NFV toolkit allowed the creation of customized images for use in NFV/VFN environments.
Then, in the beginning of 2021, PowerDNS made its first step towards becoming a fully cloud-native solution with the release of Cloud Control. PowerDNS Cloud Control 1.0 was a cloud-native deployment solution for PowerDNS, designed to help operators in their move to cloud-native services. We categorized it as a ‘lab-ready’ solution, which was suitable for integration testing. It allowed network operators to identify and validate individual requirements for a cloud-native DNS deployment.
We received lots of positive feedback and additional ideas. Now, we are happy to announce that we have implemented many of the suggested features, resulting in the availability of the second-generation version of Cloud Control. This new generation now also works with PowerDNS Authoritative Server and includes the required support for replication mechanisms and backends to store the data.
In addition, Lua scripts can be managed via Helm charts for both PowerDNS Recursor and DNSdist. This means the PowerDNS scripting and therefore the flexibility and protection (like, for example, DDoS protection) of DNSdist can now also be used in cloud-native deployments.
With these additions, Cloud Control supports all major DNS functions, and the second generation is ready for operators to use in their move to cloud-native DNS services. It lets network operators deploy a cloud-native PowerDNS recursive solution to provide end-users with DNS services.
In addition, Cloud Control enables the use of DoH and DoT encrypted DNS endpoints, helping providers to move towards offering encrypted DNS in a cloud-native way. Finally, it supports the use of PowerDNS for cloud-native authoritative and infrastructure use cases.
PowerDNS Cloud Control at a glance now includes:
- Cloud-native deployment and orchestration for large-scale PowerDNS deployments
- Deployment of PowerDNS Recursor and DNSdist on a Kubernetes cluster
- Deployment of PowerDNS Authoritative server, DNSdist and ZoneControl on a Kubernetes cluster
- Includes the official images needed for PowerDNS Recursor, Authoritative server and DNSdist to set up a complete recursive DNS ecosystem in a provider’s network
- Automated deployment and lifecycle management with Helm charts
The PowerDNS engineering team has worked hard to create this new, more complete version of Cloud Control, and we are proud that this solution is gaining a lot of attention from operators who are gradually moving to cloud-native solutions as the basis of their services.
Please reach out to us if you want to learn more about Cloud Control and cloud-native PowerDNS, as well as how we can support your move to a cloud-native DNS solution.
