Designate/Program Application

Official Title
DNS Services

Description
The DNS Services program builds systems and tools that facilitate the management of authoritative zones and records. The program takes a vendor neutral approach to compatibility with numerous domain name servers. The DNS Services Program will fill an essential gap for domain name management especially in the assigning of domains to Openstack project resources such as servers, storage nodes, load balancers and other network topology.

Mission Statement
To provide scalable, on demand, self service access to authoritative DNS services, in technology-agnostic manner.

Scope
The DNS Services Program will support the following:


 * Vendor neutrality with critical components
 * Functionality as defined, but not limited to, DNS RFCs
 * Use cases not defined in DNS RFCs but commonly solved through DNS implementation
 * Functionality supporting the operation of name servers
 * Orchestration of name servers to facilitate public and private DNS

Maturity
The current team of developers incorporates regular contributions from HP, eBay Inc., Rackspace, and Red Hat. The program maintains healthy IRC activity on #openstack-dns and meets every Wednesday at 17:00UTC.

Project Technical Lead
Kiall Mac Innes

ATC Status
The program grants Active Technical Contributor (ATC) status to anyone completing a commit to any program repository during the previous two release cycles. Core project team members may grant ATC to significant, non code contributors for two cycles.

Deliverables
The DNS Services Program is currently focused on delivering on the scope and mission for the Designate project. Critical deliverables in the upcoming Juno cycle include MiniDNS and Server Pools.

Why a new program?
Several programs, including Networking and Data Processing were considered for this mission. However, we feel the scope of DNS is large enough to fuel a new program. Additionally, the current work in progress is being managed and driven by an entirely independent group of developers with an established core team of 4, a project technical lead, regular IRC and video conference discussions, and a quarterly in-person meetup cycle for design and collaboration.

Additionally, a new program is desired as we feel programs should be formed around teams and technologies, with a focus on improving their effectiveness at delivering. Aside from some minimal integrations, there is little cross collaboration and cross pollination of developers between either the Networking or Data Processing Programs