PowerDNS needs your help: What are we missing?

May 26, 2015

Hi everybody,

As we’re working on PowerDNS 4.x, we are wondering: what are we missing?

The somewhat longer story is that as a software developer, a sort of feature-blindness creeps up on you. We try to make the software better, faster etc, but by focusing so much on the technology, one can lose sight of the actual use cases.

In this way it is possible that a software vendor neglects to implement something, even though many users desperately want it. If so, please speak up! The short version: please mail powerdns.ideas at powerdns.com your ideas!

As concrete examples, PowerDNS took its time to add an API, and once we had it, people immediately started using it, even before we had documented the API. Similarly, for many years, we did not deliver a proper graphing solution, and now that it is there it is highly popular.

But what more are we missing? Should we expand into IPAM and do DHCP and IP address management? Should we make an out of the box NAT64/DNS64 solution? Do we need to improve replication beyond “database native” and “AXFR-based” (so ‘super-duper-slave’)?

Should we start doing versioned databases so people can roll back changes?  IXFR?

Should we add a built-in DNS based load balancer where we poll if your IP addresses are up?

Or would it be wise to move on beyond the geographical versatile backends, and simply add ‘US’ and ‘Europe’, ‘Oceania’, ‘Asia’ IP address profiles?

Should the recursor gain cache sharing abilities? Or pre-fetching? Or even TTL-faking in case auths are down?

The list above is just to prime your imagination: if you have any ideas on what you are missing, please reach out to powerdns.ideas at powerdns.com, or use our contact form.

Thanks!

About the author

Peter van Dijk

Peter van Dijk

Senior Developer at PowerDNS

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