After continuous development of Lightning Stream for the PowerDNS community and the release of a Lightning Stream-schema for the PowerDNS Authoritative Server, we are excited to introduce our next product: Lightning Stream for Enterprise. Lightning Stream for Enterprise makes synchronization between authoritative servers effortless – even for large organizations.
Managing zone transfers in an authoritative DNS setup is often a complex and frustrating process. They require intricate configurations, are difficult to maintain, and frequently lead to operational challenges. Adding or removing zones to replicate is a manual process (unless you use catalog zones). Configuring multiple primary servers is particularly tricky, and traditional zone transfer mechanisms fail to address key issues. For example, DNSSEC keys do not get transferred as part of the zone transfer.
In the past, PowerDNS addressed this challenge with native replication backends, using SQL databases capable of handling replication themselves. This eliminated the need for zone transfer configurations, at least for organizations with deep SQL expertise available – something not all organizations possess.
Lightning Stream changes this for everyone by introducing native replication using S3 and the LMDB backend. It enables seamless synchronization of each Authoritative Server’s local Lightning Memory-Mapped Database (LMDB) with all other Authoritative Servers, supporting multi-primary architectures.
By leveraging LMDB backends, Lightning Stream delivers high-speed, scalable replication with one-way and two-way synchronization between authoritative instances across different data centers. This eliminates the need for complex and costly hot-standby primaries and removes the fragility of traditional zone transfers.
Introducing Lightning Stream for Enterprise: With Lightning Stream for Enterprise, we are taking synchronization to the next level by introducing incremental synchronization. Incremental synchronization is a true game-changer for large-scale PowerDNS deployments. Instead of transferring entire databases, only the changes are synchronized between authoritative servers and S3 storage, reducing data transfer volumes significantly. For organizations with frequent updates to large databases, this means:
- Much faster replication: Updates propagate between authoritative instances in just a few seconds.
- Lower bandwidth consumption: Instead of gigabytes, only a few megabytes of changes are transmitted per synchronization.
- Improved efficiency: The reduced volume of data to transfer reduces the load on infrastructure and storage resources.
- Regular Full-Syncs: Full database synchronizations are still sent on at configurable regular intervals.
LMDB with Lightning Stream is now the default backend for cloud-native deployments of the Authoritative Server when using PowerDNS Cloud Control. Cloud Control enables PowerDNS to run on containerized infrastructure, making it cloud-native by design. It also provides automation tools for a cloud-native deployment, elastic scaling, remote configuration management and monitoring. To complement this release, the next version of Cloud Control will fully support Lightning Stream for Enterprise.
With Lightning Stream for Enterprise, PowerDNS is redefining DNS synchronization. We are making it simpler, faster, and more scalable for you than ever before. Please reach out to us if you would like to discuss more about Lightning Stream for Enterprise.
