CoreDNS joins Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy

CoreDNS, the DNS server created to serve as support infrastructure for Kubernetes, has been “graduated” by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, sustainers of Kubernetes and other open source technology for building modern clouds.

The graduated status is a green light to anyone deciding whether to make CoreDNS a significant part of their Kubernetes deployment or other infrastructure, or to use CoreDNS to replace older, antiquated, or less flexible DNS servers.

A “graduated” project, in CNCF terms, is one that demonstrates “thriving adoption, diversity, a formal governance process, and a strong commitment to community sustainability and inclusivity,” according to CNCF’s statement. In plainer English, it means CoreDNS is likely to enjoy a long development lifetime with support from many quarters.

CoreDNS, originally created in 2016 and written in Go, was developed to become the default DNS server component for Kubernetes. Nonetheless, CoreDNS can work as a drop-in replacement for most conventional DNS servers. Its extensibility and flexibility, by way of a plug-in architecture, allows it to integrate with Kubernetes by providing Prometheus monitoring metrics. Its core is also multithreaded, as opposed to the single-threaded design used by some other DNS servers (such as Kube-DNS).

The thumbs-up from the CNCF should assure all of those who build infrastructure atop CoreDNS will not be left hanging in the long run. In addition to being open source, CoreDNS is architected to be a useful building block for any infrastructure. For instance, CoreDNS deploys as a single binary with no dependencies except for its configuration file.