Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch interview Peter van Dijk, author of the open-source DNS engine which forms PowerDNS, to find out how PowerDNS started and how big it can scale.
Peter explains that PowerDNS began in 2007 when the company that wrote the first open-source DNS recursive resolver called “dnsmasq” stopped maintaining it.
As the program became unsupported, PowerDNS took over the recursive resolver and the project became the de facto standard in the Linux world.
Since being taken over, PowerDNS has had many new contributors, and drivers to add new features and improve code to keep it competitive against commercial offerings.
It can scale to many thousands of queries per second and offers advanced features such as DNS-over-TLS, DNSSEC, and large DNS root servers.
PowerDNS has a strong focus on security and is designed with stability and correctness in mind and performs a critical function in core internet infrastructure.
