Cascade

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A friendly, stand-alone DNSSEC signing solution designed to communicate what it’s doing and is easy to interact with.

Cascade is currently in the alpha development phase. We would love for you to get to know Cascade and are eager to hear your experiences so we can improve every aspect. Please consider the current Known Limitations.

Cascade has the following design goals:

Flexibility

The Cascade pipeline runs as a single binary and does not require additional database software. Install with ease using a binary package or build from source. Run on-premise or in the cloud, with keys on disk or a Hardware Security Module of your choice.

Sensible defaults

Get started easily with default settings based on industry best practices.

Controllability

Cascade gives you tight control over key management automation and the DNSSEC signing process.

Observability

With Cascade you cut out the guesswork. Review Hooks allow you to use your preferred solutions to automate verification of the unsigned and signed zone, before publishing it.

Open-source with professional support services

NLnet Labs offers professional support and consultancy services with a service-level agreement.

Feedback

Our goal is to gather operator feedback. Don’t be shy and reach out by creating a GitHub issue, sending us an email, finding us in the NLnet Labs DNS channel on the DNS OARC Mattermost server, or mentioning us on Mastodon.

Examples of things we’re interested in:

  • If these documentation pages don’t answer your question, tell us what we missed.

  • Performance and memory usage are expected to improve but if you think it won’t meet your needs, tell us about your use case.

  • Not all intended functionality has been implemented at this point. If a feature that you need is missing, please let us know.

  • We are actively working to shape the user experience to operator needs. We have a lot more ideas for improvement and we’d love to hear yours too.

  • Do tell us about your positive experiences. We particularly appreciate hearing O/S, HSM and size/number of zones you worked with.