The Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced on Thursday that CoreDNS was the first project to graduate this year.
CoreDNS follows in the footsteps of last year's three open source graduates from the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Last year's class was comprised of Kubernetes, Prometheus and Envoy.
In order to move from incubation to graduation, CoreDNS had to show that it has been widely adopted, is sufficiently diverse, has a formal governance process in place, and has a strong commitment to community sustainability and inclusivity.
CoreDNS provides a means for cloud services to discover each other in cloud-native deployments. It provides a backwards-compatible and extensible integration with Kubernetes. The most recent Kubernetes release backs CoreDNS as the official default DNS for all deployments going forward, according to CNCF.
CoreDNS can also be employed in cloud-native integration for hybrid cloud environments with Amazon Web Services' AWS Route 53 and etcd with plans to support Google Cloud DNS soon.
"CoreDNS has been a part of CNCF for nearly two years and has been cultivated by the community to reach graduation and officially serve as the DNS server for Kubernetes,” said Chris Aniszczyk, COO of CNCF, in a prepared statement. “Also, CoreDNS is a fantastic standalone DNS server that continues to be used in more environments—iekwe’re excited to continue to support the community as it grows.”
CoreDNS traces its roots back to March 2016 when it was created by Miek Gieben who at the time was employed as a site reliability engineer at Google. While developing CoreDNS, the community took into account the limitations of other DNS servers to create a generic DNS server that could talk to multiple backends including etcd, Consul and Kubernetes.
CoreDNS was added to the Cloud Native Sandbox two years ago and became an incubating project in February of last year. To officially graduate from incubating status, the project adopted the CNCF's Code of Conduct. The CoreDNS team also completed 12 releases in the past year, and now has 35 built-in plugins and 15 external plugins, with several developed for the Kubernetes community.
Over the past two years, it participated in Google Summer of Code, whereby mentors are paired with student interns to help advance growing cloud-native projects.
Currently, the project has over 100 contributors, 16 active maintainers, and various organizations using it in production in and outside of Kubernetes including Bose, Hellofresh, Skyscanner, SoundCloud, Trainline and Zalando.
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Open source CoreDNS is written in Go, which originated at Google. It is licensed under the Apache License Version 2 and is completely open source. CoreDNS is able to chain plugins in order to enable additional features such as Prometheus metrics or query rewriting out of the box.
“As a project maintainer, I’ve focused on tuning CoreDNS for its adoption by the Kubernetes community, collaborating on Kubernetes deployments of CoreDNS, and validating the project as the DNS Server for Kubernetes clusters,” said Francois Tur, software manager at Infoblox. “Today’s graduation of CoreDNS from CNCF is a great achievement for our project community. This journey started more than two years ago and we’re just getting started.”