cncf-toc/proposals/coredns.adoc

== CoreDNS Proposal

*Name of project:* CoreDNS

*Description*

CoreDNS is a fast, flexible DNS server that is designed to be performant with a flexible implementation. This flexibility allows CoreDNS to be easily extended to support various data sources and to implement rich DNS service behaviors. For example, response caching, query rewrite, load-balancing, zone transfer and signing.
CoreDNS is the successor of SkyDNS. SkyDNS is a DNS server that has etcd as the datastore backend. It is widely
used in cloud deployments, but lacks the flexibility we envision for CoreDNS.

*Sponsor / Advisor from TOC*: Jonathan Boulle

*Unique Identifier*: coredns

*License*: Apache License v2.0

*Source control repositories*: https://github.com/miekg/coredns

*Initial Committers*:

* Michael Richmond github: mrichmon
* github: splack
* Felix Cantournet github: fcantournet
* github: leelynne
* Matt Layher github: mdlayher
* Vasily Vailyev github: pixelbender

*Infrastructure requirements (CI / CNCF Cluster)*: N/A

*Issue tracker*: https://github.com/miekg/coredns

*Website*: https://coredns.io

*Release methodology and mechanics*: github master

*Social media accounts*: Twitter: @corednsio

*Existing sponsorship*: Infoblox contributing developer time to implement CoreDNS->Kubernetes integration component.

*External Dependencies*

CoreDNS has a hard dependency on Caddy (mholt/caddy), as CoreDNS is a servertype-plugin to it. Technically this
means we need to patch one source file in the caddy tree, before CoreDNS can be build. Other than that it is
similar to a normal Go dependency.

* Go package: mholt/caddy (ASLV2 https://github.com/mholt/caddy/blob/master/LICENSE.txt)
* Go package: beorn7/perks (MIT https://github.com/beorn7/perks/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: coreos/etcd (ASLv2 https://github.com/coreos/etcd/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: flynn/go-shlex (ASLv2 https://github.com/flynn-archive/go-shlex/blob/master/COPYING)
* Go package: fsnotify/fsnotify (BSD https://github.com/fsnotify/fsnotify/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: golang/protobuf (BSD https://github.com/golang/protobuf/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: hashicorp/go-syslog (MIT https://github.com/hashicorp/go-syslog/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: matttproud/golang_protobuf_extensions (ASLv2 https://github.com/matttproud/golang_protobuf_extensions/blob/master/LICENSE
* Go package: miekg/dns (BSD https://github.com/miekg/dns/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: patrickmn/go-cache (MIT https://github.com/patrickmn/go-cache/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: prometheus/client_golang (ASLv2 https://github.com/prometheus/client_golang/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: prometheus/client_model (ASLv2 https://github.com/prometheus/client_model/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: prometheus/common (ASLv2 https://github.com/prometheus/common/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: prometheus/procfs (ASLv2 https://github.com/prometheus/procfs/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: ugorji/go (MIT https://github.com/ugorji/go/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: xenolf/lego (MIT https://github.com/xenolf/lego/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: golang/x/crypto (BSD https://github.com/golang/crypto/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: golang/x/net (BSD https://github.com/golang/net/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: golang/x/sys (BSD https://github.com/golang/sys/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Go package: natefinch/lumberjack.v2 (MIT https://github.com/natefinch/lumberjack/blob/v2.0/LICENSE)
* Go package: square/go-jose.v1 (ASLv2 https://github.com/square/go-jose/blob/master/LICENSE)
* Kubernetes (for CoreDNS -> kubernetes integration) (ASLv2 https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/LICENSE)

*Statement on alignment with CNCF mission*:

CoreDNS is a focused lightweight DNS server. A microservice philosophy guides the internal design of CoreDNS. Individual DNS functions are provided by discrete, composable plugins that are enabled via runtime configuration.
CoreDNS can be thought of as a DNS protocol head that can be configured to front various backend data sources. A flexible DNS server is a necessary component to provide “Naming and Discovery” services to containers running in the CNCF distributed system services environment.

*Comparison with KubeDNS*:

The incumbent DNS service for kubernetes, “kubedns”, consists of four components:
* etcd provides a DNS data cache,
* kube2sky provides the mechanism for updating the etcd data cache,
* skydns provides the DNS service based on the data cached in etcd,
* exechealthz provides health-check status.

Running CoreDNS with kubernetes only requires the coredns component. CoreDNS does not require a separate data cache or update service. CoreDNS includes an optional health-check “middleware” component that can be used for service monitoring.

CoreDNS provides a cleaner, more extensible codebase as compared to SkyDNS. (Both SkyDNS and CoreDNS were authored by Miek Gieben.)

CoreDNS is currently being extended to operate directly with kubernetes to access the service data. This “middleware” implementation for CoreDNS provides the same client-facing behavior as KubeDNS. The pipeline-based design of CoreDNS allows easy extension to use any container orchestrator as a DNS data source.

With the kubernetes middleware, CoreDNS can be considered as an alternative to SkyDNS with lower runtime complexity. Performance testing to compare against SkyDNS is pending.