TL;DR

Thinking about a simple backend for CoreDNS.

I might have to use CoreDNS for a work-related issue and I started looking at it.

On the one hand, it’s a cool project, whose adoption by the Kubernetes project says a lot about the trust that there is in this technology.

On the other hand… I’m not totally sure it’s the right choice for a more generic project. I mean, it’s working fine in Kubernetes, but the backend is totally not reusable, so I seem to be a bit out of luck if I need a more common DNS that I need to manipulate with some RESTish API.

I saw that there are a few more traditional ways to support a different backend:

• etcd - the plugin page seems discouraging;
• plain host-files - very quick to setup and pre-integrated plugin, but the interface is really low-level;
• other file-based alternatives - still quick to setup, but files…

Ideally I’d like something that I can then install inside another Kubernetes cluster and have some kind of persistence, so my choice so far is to use the Postgresql backend pdsql. Which, by the way, is not included in the binary by default, so I have to recompile CoreDNS…

It’s a lot of work for something that I was expecting to work out of the box 😅