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GEP-2627 DNS Policy #2712

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# GEP-2627: DNS configuration within Gateway API

* Issue: [#2627](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api/issues/2627)
* Status: Provisional

## TLDR

For gateway infrastructure to be valuable we need to be able to connect clients to these gateways. A common way to achieve this is to use domain names/hostnames and DNS. Gateways define listeners that can have assigned hostnames or wildcards. The guidelines for DNS configuration are a critical piece of service networking, but this is currently not expressible as part of Gateway API. Instead of leaving this unspecified and having implementations do this in potentially wildly different ways, the purpose of this proposal is to provide a standard way to specify DNS for Gateways.

## Goals
* Provide DNS specification for Gateway resources
* Support multiple DNS providers and a selection mechanism for Gateways
* Provide Gateway status to communicate the state of provisioned DNS
* Increase portability and supportability between Gateway API implementations and third party controllers offering DNS integration.

## Non-Goals

* Providing any upstream hostname validation mechanisms. We can provide status for validation failure, but implementations are responsible for validation.
* Multi-cluster DNS for multi-cluster ingress solutions

## Use Cases

As a cluster administrator, I manage a set of domains and a set of gateways. I would like to declaratively define which gateways should be used for provisioning DNS records, and, if necessary, which DNS provider to use to configure connectivity for clients accessing these domains and my gateway so that I can see and configure which DNS provider is being used.

As a cluster administrator, I would like to have the DNS names automatically populated into my specified DNS zones as a set of records based on the assigned addresses of my gateways so that I do not have to undertake external automation or management of this essential task.

As a cluster administrator I would have the status of the DNS records reported back to me, so that I can leverage existing kube based monitoring tools to know the status of the integration.

As a cluster administrator, I would like the DNS records to be updated automatically if the `spec` of assigned gateways changes, whether those changes are for IP address or hostname.
As a DNS administrator, I should be able to ensure that only approved External DNS controllers can make changes to DNS zone configuration. (This should in general be taken care of by DNS system <-> External DNS controller interactions like user credentials and operation status responses, but it is important to remember that it needs to happen).
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We don't cover any application developer user stories here, we seem pretty focused on the cluster administrator. I anticipate that application developers will in fact will have relevant use cases. What are your thoughts on application developer roles needs here?

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I am struggling a little to think of specific application developer use cases around this. What comes to mind is allowing the DNSPolicy to potentially target a HTTPRoute or possibly some form of health check based on the available endpoints behind a service. So as an attempt at a use case "As an application developer, I do not want my service to be exposed via the Gateway until there are pods that are healthy and ready to serve the traffic" ? Did you have anything specific in mind?

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@kflynn, @mlavacca, @arkodg curious if you have any thoughts here?

## API

Initial draft will not offer an API yet until the use cases are agreed. Some thoughts worth thinking about:
- I think it is important that we try to move away from APIs based on annotations which, while convenient, are not a full API and suffer from several limitations. An example: I want to configure a listener with a domain I own that is in a different provider than the domains of the other listeners. I want to add a new option to configure a particular weighting and so on. Soon you end up with a large set of connected annotations that often grow in complexity that really should be expressed as an API.

- It is also important that this API can be delegated to controllers other than the Gateway API provider/implementor. This is because there are existing solutions that may want to support whatever API decided upon. It should not **have** to be a gateway provider that has to integrate with many DNS providers.

## Conformance Details

TBD

## Alternatives

it is possible to use `external-dns` to manage dns based on HTTPRoutes and Gateways https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/external-dns/blob/7f3c10d65297ec1c4bcc8dd6f88c189b7f3e80d0/docs/tutorials/gateway-api.md. The aim of this GEP is not remove this as an option, but instead provide a common API that could then be leveraged by something like external-dns.

## References

TBD
8 changes: 8 additions & 0 deletions geps/gep-2627/metadata.yaml
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apiVersion: internal.gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: GEPDetails
number: 2627
name: DNS configuration for Gateway API
status: Provisional
authors:
- maleck13