BIND 10 Workshops

By Mr. Arno Meulenkamp, one of Men&Mice experts.

Since February 2013, to roughly coincide with the release of version 1.0 of BIND 10, Men&Mice, together with ISC, has been conducting BIND 10 workshops, allowing administrators to get a feel for the new software from ISC. The workshops have been a great success and feedback has been almost unanimously positive. In the workshops, several bug reports have been sent to ISC, with some fixes incorporated in the upcoming 1.2.0 release.

In every workshop up to now  (we won't guarantee it for future workshops!) we've had actual BIND 10 developers come in and talk about the development and answer questions. The BIND 10 team is very approachable and this has really helped with developing this workshop, but also in getting participants to think about what they need to implement BIND 10 best in their environment.

BIND 10 is a major change from BIND 9, not only in functionality (currently DNS *and* DHCP are supported, with no real limits on other additions later on), but also in configuration (no more named.conf!), flexibility (you only have to load the modules you need and you can relatively simply develop modules for features you miss) and development model (more bazaar than cathedral). In almost all cases, the people that came to the workshops have been impressed and sometimes even excited about the possibilities that BIND 10 will give.

At the same time, it became clear that the expectations of the big "1.0" release were different from reality. Lots of time and effort has been spent by the ISC developers to put a structure in place that is fast and stable and will allow for a scalable and flexible platform. That meant that some areas have gotten more attention than others, and this consequently means that the BIND 10 modules you need might not be feature complete or tested properly to be deployed in a production environment right now. You should make sure the functionality you need is ready or scheduled to be included soon before you create your deployment schedule.

That's not to say that BIND 10 now is not ready, but there are some very rough edges still and the expectations that we see in the workshop are for a much smoother ride. Until that smooth ride is here though, we have the BIND 10 workshop that will give you a look at this exciting new software and allows you to poke and prod and start imagining how this software will fit into your workflow, and what work needs to be done to get BIND 10 to be deployed in your network.

You may just find yourself writing code for BIND 10 or sponsor the development of your killer feature.

We hope to see you soon in one of our workshops!