Splendns

Splendns is an open-source distributed DNS management system designed to provide scalable and reliable DNS hosting and zone management for organizations that operate multiple zones or regions. It emphasizes automation, fault tolerance, and security, and can operate across data centers and cloud environments.

The project architecture separates the control plane from the data plane. A consensus-based cluster coordinates zone configurations, DNSSEC signing, and policy enforcement, while DNS servers in the data plane serve authoritative and recursive queries. Zones are replicated across regions to improve availability, and backends for storage can be pluggable, including options such as etcd or relational databases. The data plane is designed to be stateless, enabling easier scaling and rolling upgrades. The system supports features commonly found in modern DNS platforms, including anycast-ready deployment patterns.

Key features include declarative zone configuration, DNSSEC signing and key management, dynamic updates via a REST API, and role-based access control with audit logging. It offers policy-based routing and GeoDNS to direct users to appropriate endpoints, as well as health checks and automatic failover for resilience. Splendns also integrates with CI/CD pipelines to automate zone changes, and provides tooling for schema migrations, testing, and change validation.

Deployment and operations are geared toward containerized environments. Splendns provides Kubernetes-native support through operators or Helm charts, a RESTful API, and a command-line interface. It includes observability hooks with Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, and centralized log aggregation to aid monitoring and incident response.

As a community-driven project, Splendns remains an open platform with ongoing contributions from multiple groups. It is used in lab setups and in some production contexts where organizations seek an extensible, open DNS management solution. See also DNS, DNSSEC, and GeoDNS.