How we made our DNS stack 3x faster

Cloudflare's DNS service has been made 3x faster by replacing two core elements: the authoritative DNS server (rrDNS) and the data pipeline that distributes DNS record changes to edge machines. The data pipeline was rewritten to use a new data model that groups RRSets by RRSet and combines values for common record types (A/AAAA/CNAME) into single keys, reducing KV store lookups. MessagePack was adopted as the serialization format for its speed and ease of integration with the existing Go codebase and the miekg/dns library. The new data pipeline, written in Go, propagates zone changes globally in seconds. The authoritative rrDNS server was also rewritten (v2) to align with the new data model, improving performance and test coverage. The new system has resulted in a 9x reduction in storage space at the edge and a 3x faster response time for DNS queries.