coredns/middleware/proxy

proxy

proxy facilitates both a basic reverse proxy and a robust load balancer. The proxy has support for multiple backends. The load balancing features include multiple policies, health checks, and failovers. If all hosts fail their health check the proxy middleware will fail back to randomly selecting a target and sending packets to it.

Syntax

In its most basic form, a simple reverse proxy uses this syntax:

proxy FROM TO

• FROM is the base domain to match for the request to be proxied
• TO is the destination endpoint to proxy to

However, advanced features including load balancing can be utilized with an expanded syntax:

proxy FROM TO... {
    policy random|least_conn|round_robin
    fail_timeout DURATION
    max_fails INTEGER
    health_check PATH:PORT [DURATION]
    except IGNORED_NAMES...
    spray
    protocol [dns|https_google]
}

• FROM is the name to match for the request to be proxied.
• TO is the destination endpoint to proxy to. At least one is required, but multiple may be specified. To may be an IP:Port pair, or may reference a file in resolv.conf format
• policy is the load balancing policy to use; applies only with multiple backends. May be one of random, least_conn, or round_robin. Default is random.
• fail_timeout specifies how long to consider a backend as down after it has failed. While it is down, requests will not be routed to that backend. A backend is "down" if CoreDNS fails to communicate with it. The default value is 10 seconds ("10s").
• max_fails is the number of failures within fail_timeout that are needed before considering a backend to be down. If 0, the backend will never be marked as down. Default is 1.
• health_check will check path (on port) on each backend. If a backend returns a status code of 200-399, then that backend is healthy. If it doesn't, the backend is marked as unhealthy for duration and no requests are routed to it. If this option is not provided then health checks are disabled. The default duration is 10 seconds ("10s").
• ignored_names... is a space-separated list of paths to exclude from proxying. Requests that match any of these paths will be passed through.
• spray when all backends are unhealthy, randomly pick one to send the traffic to. (This is a failsafe.)
• protocol specifies what protocol to use to speak to an upstream, dns (the default) is plain old DNS, and https_google uses https://dns.google.com and speaks a JSON DNS dialect.

Policies

There are three load-balancing policies available:

• random (default) - Randomly select a backend
• least_conn - Select the backend with the fewest active connections
• round_robin - Select the backend in round-robin fashion

All polices implement randomly spraying packets to backend hosts when no healthy hosts are available. This is to preeempt the case where the healthchecking (as a mechanism) fails.

Upstream Protocols

Currently supported are dns (i.e., standard DNS over UDP) and https_google. Note that with https_google the entire transport is encrypted. Only you and Google can see your DNS activity.

Metrics

If monitoring is enabled (via the prometheus directive) then the following metric is exported:

• coredns_proxy_request_duration_milliseconds{zone}

The metric shows the duration for a proxied request, the zone label is the FROM as specified in the configuration.

Examples

Proxy all requests within example.org. to a backend system:

proxy example.org localhost:9005

Load-balance all requests between three backends (using random policy):

proxy . dns1.local:53 dns2.local:1053 dns3.local

Same as above, but round-robin style:

proxy . dns1.local:53 dns2.local:1053 dns3.local {
	policy round_robin
}

With health checks and proxy headers to pass hostname, IP, and scheme upstream:

proxy . dns1.local:53 dns2.local:53 dns3.local:53 {
	policy round_robin
	health_check /health:8080
}

Proxy everything except requests to miek.nl or example.org

proxy . backend:1234 {
	except miek.nl example.org
}

Proxy everything except example.org using the host resolv.conf nameservers:

proxy . /etc/resolv.conf {
	except miek.nl example.org
}