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Comment by nik736 | Hacker News Reader

How does it compare to PowerDNS?

PowerDNS provides the standard by which other DNS resolvers are judged. It's an amazing, stable product. Our biggest features compared to PowerDNS are that we provide DNS-over-TLS, we're written in memory safe golang (which is also highly concurrent, although so is PowerDNS), and we support BGP natively, making "internet wide" deployments a breeze.

All of these things could be done with PowerDNS, but it would also require a number of other programs "helping" in order to get TLS and BGP, and the configuration would be a mess. With TentaDNS it's all in one convenient, easy to run place, with a single set of config, running multiple (even 10s or hundreds) of resolver configs all in one place.

That having been said, our Authoritative support (e.g. being the main nameserver for a domain) still lacks a lot of features, while our recursive support (e.g. being the resolver you use for your browser) is top notch.

For me the authoritative support would be relevant. Can you please elaborate on what important thing is missing?

What's a recommended way of using your product in a redundant way? PowerDNS for example has multiple backends, what I am missing is a bind style backend that is based on JSON files and is able to reload on the fly, so that I don't have to deal with a SQL database. Is this something that could be achieved with Tenta?

Hello, PowerDNS developer here! Not trying to steal Tenta's thunder here, but you should know that the PowerDNS GeoIP backend can be used without a GeoIP database, in which case it might better be called the 'YAML backend'.

Additionally, if you file a feature request for JSON support in the bindbackend, we might consider it!

We've previously used a redis-replicated backend to powerdns. The fact that it was pluggable was awesome. We'd love to support something like that one day. For now, however, our eye is firmly on recursion. If a golang DNS server designed for anycast is something people want, we'll keep developing authoritative features. If not, we'll stick to recursion.

What does "BGP support" mean for a DNS resolver? Generally curious, as the internet ran fine for decades without combining the two.

We natively work a BGP, making it easy and practical to do things like "anycast" (announcing the same IP address from multiple datacenters), or using BGP for load balancing or failover. Looking at large and successful DNS providers (Google, Amazon, Dyn, Neustar, etc), all are running BGP as part of their DNS offering. We've combined it into one piece of software.

This is a much more interesting feature than DNSSEC and is what you should lead with.

Why not leave that responsibility to something else like bird, quagga, etc? Those have been doing the job just fine for years.

A lot of this sounds like rewriting the wheel in Go because Go is "hip".

Do one thing, and do it well.

Well, we didn't rewrite BGP in go, we used the excellent OSRG library for that. We played with several of the open source BGP libraries, but these inevitably result in a giant mess of configs and scripts holding things together, and furthermore, it's hard to signal network condition back and forth between the different parts of the process. One of the great powers of go lies in the ability to pull in fully functional components via the package manager. Rather than having to provide a long list of other dependencies to install along with Tenta DNS, we simply provide a single binary that has all the parts rolled in.

Thank you for the kind words! - Peter van Dijk, PowerDNS

And thank you for PowerDNS. We got to the point with this where we wanted the convenience and easy parallelism of go, but we've used powerdns many times over the years, and it's been a great contribution to the net.

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