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Using NodeLocal DNSCache in Kubernetes clusters

This page provides an overview of NodeLocal DNSCache feature in Kubernetes.

Before you begin

You need to have a Kubernetes cluster, and the kubectl command-line tool must be configured to communicate with your cluster. If you do not already have a cluster, you can create one by using Minikube, or you can use one of these Kubernetes playgrounds:

To check the version, enter kubectl version.

Introduction

NodeLocal DNSCache improves Cluster DNS performance by running a dns caching agent on cluster nodes as a DaemonSet. In today’s architecture, Pods in ClusterFirst DNS mode reach out to a kube-dns serviceIP for DNS queries. This is translated to a kube-dns/CoreDNS endpoint via iptables rules added by kube-proxy. With this new architecture, Pods will reach out to the dns caching agent running on the same node, thereby avoiding iptables DNAT rules and connection tracking. The local caching agent will query kube-dns service for cache misses of cluster hostnames(cluster.local suffix by default).

Motivation

Architecture Diagram

This is the path followed by DNS Queries after NodeLocal DNSCache is enabled:

NodeLocal DNSCache flow

Nodelocal DNSCache flow

This image shows how NodeLocal DNSCahe handles DNS queries.

Configuration

This feature can be enabled using the command:

KUBE_ENABLE_NODELOCAL_DNS=true go run hack/e2e.go -v --up

This works for e2e clusters created on GCE. On all other environments, the following steps will setup NodeLocal DNSCache:

Once enabled, node-local-dns Pods will run in the kube-system namespace on each of the cluster nodes. This Pod runs CoreDNS in cache mode, so all CoreDNS metrics exposed by the different plugins will be available on a per-node basis.

Feature availability

The addon can be applied using the yaml specified above in any k8s version. The feature support is as described:

k8s version Feature support
1.15 Beta(Not enabled by default)
1.13 Alpha(Not enabled by default)

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