How to Add a Custom DNS Zone in NodeLocal DNSCache

Why Use Custom DNS Zones in NodeLocal DNSCache? NodeLocal DNSCache speeds up DNS resolution in Kubernetes by running a local CoreDNS instance on each node. Adding custom zones allows: Fast resolution of static or internal domains DNS overrides without relying on upstream resolvers Separation of internal and external DNS logic Step-by-Step Guide 1. Get the NodeLocal DNS ConfigMap kubectl -n kube-system get configmap node-local-dns -o yaml > node-local-dns.yaml 2. Add Custom Zones Inside the Corefile section, add your custom zone using the hosts plugin: ...

July 19, 2025 · 2 min · 222 words · John Cena

What is NodeLocalDNS and How It Works

What is NodeLocalDNS? NodeLocalDNS is an optional feature in Kubernetes that improves DNS performance and reliability by running a small DNS caching server on each node. Instead of making every DNS request go across the network to the kube-dns or CoreDNS service, the request is handled locally on the node. This reduces DNS lookup latency and avoids overloading the shared cluster DNS service. Why Use NodeLocalDNS? 🧠 Faster DNS resolution — queries are resolved from local cache. 📉 Reduced load on kube-dns/CoreDNS — fewer round trips to the central service. 🌐 Better reliability — even if CoreDNS has a hiccup, cached results can still resolve. How NodeLocalDNS Works Here’s a simplified flow: ...

July 19, 2025 · 2 min · 288 words · John Cena

What is Observability? Explained Simply

What is Observability? Have you ever deployed an app to production and something just felt… off? Maybe it’s slower than usual. Maybe users are seeing errors, but you’re not sure why. This is where observability comes in. Observability is about answering the question: “What’s going on inside my system?” 🧠 The Core Idea Observability is the ability to understand the internal state of a system based on the data it produces: logs, metrics, and traces. ...

July 18, 2025 · 2 min · 297 words · John Cena

What is Prometheus? Explained Simply

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that was originally built at SoundCloud. Think of it as your application’s heartbeat monitor — constantly watching, collecting, and helping you understand what’s going on. 🧠 Why Prometheus? Imagine you’re running an application with hundreds of containers across multiple environments. How do you know if something’s slow or broken? Prometheus answers that by: Scraping metrics from your apps and infrastructure Storing data efficiently using a time-series database Letting you query metrics with a powerful language (PromQL) Alerting you when things go wrong 🔧 How It Works Prometheus works by pulling metrics from exporters (tiny HTTP servers that expose /metrics). For example: ...

July 18, 2025 · 2 min · 241 words · John Cena

Kubernetes Explained in Simple Terms

What Is Kubernetes, Really? Imagine you’re running a lot of apps across many computers. How do you keep track of them all? How do you make sure that if one crashes, it restarts? What if you want to update one without breaking the others? That’s where Kubernetes comes in. Kubernetes (a.k.a. K8s) is an open-source system designed to help you deploy, manage, scale, and monitor containerized applications automatically. Think of it as the brains of your cloud-native app infrastructure. ...

July 17, 2025 · 2 min · 350 words · John Cena