Scaling and Securing CoreDNS: Performance and Resilience - Yong Tang & John Belamaric

Don't miss out! Join us at our next Flagship Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (23-26 March, 2026). Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at https://kubecon.io Scaling and Securing CoreDNS: Performance and Resilience - Yong Tang, DataDirect Networks & John Belamaric, Google CoreDNS continues to evolve as the DNS backbone of Kubernetes, with recent updates focused on performance, extensibility, and operational hardening. This session explores a new plugin that improves multi-core scalability, enabling higher throughput and lower latency in large-scale clusters. We’ll share tuning strategies, production insights, and how CoreDNS is adapting to modern DNS workloads. We’ll also touch on best practices for securing DNS in Kubernetes—including common attack patterns like spoofing and cache abuse—and how CoreDNS features can help mitigate them. Finally, we’ll review recent plugin ecosystem changes and preview what’s ahead on the project roadmap. Whether you operate clusters or contribute upstream, this session offers practical guidance on running CoreDNS securely and efficiently at scale.