⚡ ShardDNS

A stateless, cloud-native DNS server built for high throughput — backed by ScyllaDB and controlled via gRPC.

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Overview

ShardDNS is a high-performance authoritative DNS server written in Go. It uses ScyllaDB as its only storage backend, making every server instance completely stateless and horizontally scalable. Zones and records are managed at runtime through a gRPC API — no config files, no restarts.

Key Features

• 🚀 High Throughput — concurrent worker pool with buffer pooling for zero-allocation hot paths
• 🌐 UDP & TCP — full RFC-compliant DNS over both transports with TC-bit truncation
• 🗄️ ScyllaDB Backend — LZ4-compressed records table with Leveled Compaction for low-latency lookups
• 🔌 gRPC Control Plane — manage zones and records dynamically without restarts
• ☁️ Cloud Native — stateless design, Docker-ready, environment-variable configuration
• 🔁 CNAME Chaining — automatic in-zone CNAME target resolution
• 📋 SOA & NXDOMAIN — authoritative negative responses with SOA records in the authority section

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Architecture

                ┌──────────────┐
  DNS Clients   │   ShardDNS   │   gRPC Clients
 ─────────────► │              │ ◄──────────────
  UDP / TCP :53 │  Worker Pool │  :9053
                │              │
                └──────┬───────┘
                       │
                ┌──────▼───────┐
                │   ScyllaDB   │
                │  zones       │
                │  records     │
                └──────────────┘

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Container Image

Images are published to the GitHub Container Registry on every push to main and on version tags.

# Latest
docker pull ghcr.io/adatage/sharddns:latest

# Specific version
docker pull ghcr.io/adatage/sharddns:v1.2.3

Tag pattern	When published
latest	Every push to main
v1.2.3	On git tag v1.2.3
1.2	On git tag v1.2.x

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Quick Start

Docker Compose (Recommended)

Spin up ScyllaDB, apply the schema, and start ShardDNS in one command:

docker compose up -d

The default docker-compose.yml builds from source. To use the pre-built image from GHCR instead, set the sharddns service image:

sharddns:
  image: ghcr.io/adatage/sharddns:latest

This starts:

• ScyllaDB on port 9042
• ShardDNS DNS server on port 53 (UDP/TCP)
• ShardDNS gRPC server on port 9053

Build from Source

# Install buf (for protobuf generation)
# https://buf.build/docs/installation

make build-all      # generate proto + build both binaries
make run            # build and run the DNS server

Binaries are output to bin/:

• bin/sharddns — DNS + gRPC server
• bin/sharddns-cli — management CLI

Go Client

The generated gRPC client package is committed to this repo and importable directly:

go get github.com/Adatage/ShardDNS/api

import dnsmgr "github.com/Adatage/ShardDNS/api"

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Configuration

ShardDNS is configured entirely via environment variables (see .env.example):

Variable	Default	Description
DNS_ADDR	:53	Address the DNS server listens on (UDP & TCP)
GRPC_ADDR	:9053	Address the gRPC management server listens on
WORKERS	0	Worker goroutines (0 = runtime.NumCPU())
LOG_LEVEL	info	Log level: debug, info, warn, error
SCYLLA_HOSTS	127.0.0.1	Comma-separated ScyllaDB hostnames or IPs
SCYLLA_KEYSPACE	sharddns	ScyllaDB keyspace
SCYLLA_USERNAME	(empty)	ScyllaDB username (optional)
SCYLLA_PASSWORD	(empty)	ScyllaDB password (optional)

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gRPC API

The control plane is defined in proto/dns_manager.proto and exposed on the GRPC_ADDR port.

Zone Management

RPC	Description
CreateZone	Create a new DNS zone
GetZone	Fetch a zone by name
UpdateZone	Update SOA parameters of a zone
DeleteZone	Delete a zone
ListZones	Paginated list of all zones

Record Management

RPC	Description
CreateRecord	Add a DNS record to a zone
DeleteRecord	Remove a specific DNS record
ListRecords	List all records in a zone (paginated)
GetRecords	Look up records by zone, name, and type

Example — create a zone and add an A record

# Using grpcurl
grpcurl -plaintext -d '{
  "name": "example.com",
  "primary_ns": "ns1.example.com",
  "admin_email": "admin.example.com",
  "refresh": 3600,
  "retry": 900,
  "expire": 604800,
  "minimum_ttl": 300
}' localhost:9053 dns_manager.DNSManager/CreateZone

grpcurl -plaintext -d '{
  "zone": "example.com",
  "name": "www.example.com",
  "type": "A",
  "ttl": 300,
  "rdata": "93.184.216.34"
}' localhost:9053 dns_manager.DNSManager/CreateRecord

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Database Schema

The schema lives in cql/database.cql and is applied automatically by Docker Compose.

Table	Primary Key	Notes
zones	name	SOA parameters per zone
records	(zone, name) + type, rdata	LZ4 compression, Leveled Compaction
dnssec_keys	(zone) + flags, key_tag	Reserved for future DNSSEC support

Apply the schema manually:

make schema

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Development

make proto        # regenerate gRPC/protobuf code from .proto files
make build        # compile server and CLI binaries
make test         # run all tests
make lint         # run go vet
make docker-up    # start ScyllaDB + ShardDNS via Docker Compose
make docker-down  # stop all containers
make clean        # remove build artifacts

Note: The api/ directory (generated protobuf code) is committed to the repo. After editing any .proto file, run make proto and commit the updated api/ files. CI will fail if the committed files are out of sync with the proto definitions.

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License

Distributed under the Apache 2.0 License.