Every so often, I’m asked about Infoblox and open source. “Don’t you guys just exploit open source?” some folks will ask. “After all, you’re running BIND and ISC DHCP on Linux!”
The answer to that question is an unequivocal “Yes!” We do use BIND, the ISC DHCP server and the Kea DHCP server in our products. We use NLnet Labs’ Unbound DNS server in our products, too, as well as CoreDNS, another open source DNS server.
Reuse is the entire purpose of open source software. Open source is vital to virtually every business operating on the Internet, and promotes interoperability on the Internet. Because the protocol engines we use at Infoblox are open source, you can be assured of their compliance with standards and compatibility with other implementations.
Since Infoblox depends on a strong open source community, we also “pay it forward” by sustaining and sponsoring the developers of the open source software you all use. We’ve had an ongoing relationship with ISC for over 18 years, helping sustain the BIND, ISC DHCP and Kea teams through both good economic times and bad. Likewise we’re a proud sponsor of NLnet Labs’ work.
We do more than write checks, though. We’ve worked directly with these organizations to sponsor new features. We worked with ISC, for example, to underwrite the development of a new kind of DHCP high availability that would work with their Kea DHCP server, and we contributed to its design. That feature is now available to every user of Kea.
Sometimes, we do the development work ourselves. We’ve contributed features and fixes to ISC. Our extensive QA facilities sometimes catch bugs that we inform ISC and other partners about. We test the patches they provide, and on occasion have identified problems with those patches.
None of this would be possible without substantial bench strength in DNS and DHCP, and we employ several veterans of ISC and other open source organizations. Their familiarity with the open source code and close relationships with the staff of these organizations helps us work effectively with them.
And let’s not forget CoreDNS, a plugin-based DNS server widely used in containerized environments. It’s the default DNS server used with Kubernetes. Three of the top five contributors to CoreDNS are current or former Infoblox employees, and Infoblox employees helped introduce CoreDNS to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and shepherd it to Graduated status. Two of us even co-wrote a book about it. We use CoreDNS extensively in our cloud-managed DDI and DNS security products, BloxOne DDI and BloxOne Threat Defense, and we’ll continue to contribute code we’ve developed in support of those products back to CoreDNS.
As for the “just” in “just exploit open source,” we developed the Infoblox Grid, which allows companies to manage hundreds of DNS and DHCP servers from a single interface and API, and which provides unmatched resiliency and security that thousands of customers rely on. We built BloxOne, a cloud-managed platform based on containers, Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies, to support applications including BloxOne DDI and BloxOne Threat Defense.
So, do we exploit open source? Damn right we do, and we’re proud of it!
