As 2025 draws to a close, we take a moment, as always, to reflect on what we’ve accomplished this year. Two entirely new products, a new product generation, seven major releases, and two product certifications would already have given us plenty of reason to celebrate. But this year brought us two additional milestones…
The first milestone came during the first half of 2025. We celebrated a remarkable achievement that speaks volumes about the quality of our software: in over 10 years, we have not received a single Severity 1 support case from our customers. This achievement highlights the stability, security, and performance of our solutions. In network security and infrastructure, a reliable, high-performance DNS solution is critical for ensuring smooth, secure, and uninterrupted operations.
The fact that PowerDNS has maintained such a record for an entire decade is no coincidence. It reflects our relentless commitment to building robust, secure, and high-quality DNS solutions.
Because our engineers don’t have to act as emergency responders for Severity 1 cases – and because even Severity 2 cases remain rare – they can focus their energy on developing new products and improving existing ones. This year, that focus enabled us to launch two completely new add-ons: DNSdist Defender and Lightning Stream Enterprise.
DNSdist Defender enhances the already powerful Lua capabilities of DNSdist by offering a user-friendly and efficient way to filter malicious DNS traffic. Acting as a DNS firewall, it provides comprehensive protection, including DNS tunneling and data-exfiltration prevention, mitigation of pseudo-random subdomain (PRSD) attacks, protection against reflection and amplification threats, defense against device takeover via command-and-control (C2) attempts, and easy per-subscriber rate-limiting and DDoS configuration. DNSdist Defender’s YAML-based configuration, frequent updates with curated rules from PowerDNS, and seamless compatibility with the latest DNSdist releases ensure that operators can deploy advanced filtering rules without unnecessary complexity.
The second new add-on, Lightning Stream Enterprise, is designed to make synchronization between authoritative servers effortless. Our open-source Lightning Stream component introduced native replication using S3 and the LMDB backend, enabling seamless synchronization of each Authoritative Server’s local LMDB database with all others – supporting true multi-primary architectures. Lightning Stream Enterprise takes this further with incremental synchronization, a genuine game-changer for large-scale deployments. Instead of transferring entire databases, only changes are synchronized between authoritative servers and S3 storage, dramatically reducing data transfer volumes.
Our existing products certainly didn’t fall short this year, either. In mid-2025, with the release of Authoritative Server 5.0, we delivered one of the most requested features of recent years: support for Views. Views allow the server to return different DNS responses to the same query based on the source of the request, such as client IP address, network range, or transport protocol. This is especially beneficial for Split-Horizon DNS setups or any environment requiring network-specific DNS behavior, such as internal/external segmentation or VPN access.
DNSdist 2.0 also received a major update and is now fully configurable in YAML. YAML offers a simple, human-readable, standardized way to represent structured data, making it easier to configure, maintain, and automate. Introducing YAML support in DNSdist is part of a broader initiative to simplify and unify configuration across PowerDNS products, many of which now support YAML. With DNSdist 2.0, configuring DNSdist entirely in YAML and tailoring it to specific needs has never been easier – an important improvement for a tool that optimizes DNS traffic for hundreds of millions of internet users every day.
Alongside simple configuration, easy and automated deployment of our products remains a key priority. In the cloud-native space, this is handled by PowerDNS Cloud Control. This year, two independent certifications confirmed what our customers have long known: Cloud Control is ideally suited for cloud-native DNS operations.
Broadcom, through its VMware Ready for Telco Cloud Certification Program, certified that Cloud Control is suitable for interoperability and optimization with other applications and network functions on the VMware Telco Cloud platform. Additionally, Cloud Control was validated for the Sylva Project, an open-source telco cloud and edge framework led by Linux Foundation Europe and tailored to the needs of European network operators.
As pioneers in cloud-native DNS, we’ve spent years developing solutions tailored for these environments. These two certifications show that Cloud Control meets the requirements of low latency, high availability, and scalability in cloud-native DNS environments – supporting a smooth transition toward 5G and modern network architectures. It’s gratifying to see this approach recognized not only by our customers but also by respected market certifications.
We are also proud to have contributed to another open-source project this year. Recent regulatory changes in the EU, such as the Cyber Resilience Act and related requirements, have raised concerns about the sustainability of open-source projects. While companies may absorb additional compliance costs, volunteer-driven projects may struggle. To highlight the importance of open-source software for the DNS ecosystem and the broader internet, ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) collected data on industry reliance on open source. As open source is part of our DNS DNA, this project was especially meaningful to us.
As expected, DNS heavily depends on open-source software. Open source in DNS is not a niche practice, it is the dominant reality. It is the standard for the most fundamental components of DNS infrastructure. For example, at least nine of the twelve independent organizations operating the Internet’s Root Server System (RSS) rely exclusively on open-source implementations, and nine of the ten largest top-level domain (TLD) operators use open-source DNS software. You can find the full results here.
Finally, toward the end of the year, we had a truly special reason to celebrate: our 25th anniversary. On October 31, 2000, PowerDNS.com B.V. was officially registered by our founder, our former long-time colleague, and still dear friend Bert Hubert. We celebrated this occasion, and especially the evolution of PowerDNS since then, with customers, partners, industry experts, and colleagues in The Hague, the Netherlands, where it all began.
Talks about the early PowerDNS years, the present, and perspectives from partners, experts, and customers clearly showed how PowerDNS has grown into a global company with engineering, product, technical consulting, project delivery, support, sales, and marketing teams all around the world. We expanded our portfolio into Enterprise DNS, Protective DNS, DNS-based security, and more. Today, PowerDNS commercial solutions power the internet for over 400 million subscribers.
Our community editions likely serve several times more, and they play an essential role in our journey. Amid all the celebrations, we did not forget those who contribute to PowerDNS or the broader open-source community: the people who write code or documentation, report issues, test new ideas, challenge us, and, just like PowerDNS, advocate for an open, secure, and borderless internet. We are deeply grateful for your contributions and your friendship over the years. Without you, we would not be where we are today.
We are proud of these and many other achievements from the past year. We hope that our milestones in 2025 have been helpful to you in your daily DNS work. For now, we wish you a peaceful end to the year and a great start into 2026!