Mesos-DNS provides service discovery within DC/OS clusters. It is fully integrated into DC/OS and allows applications and services on the cluster to find each other through the domain name system (DNS), similar to how services discover each other throughout the Internet. Mesos-DNS does not perform any caching.

Applications launched by Marathon are assigned names such as search.marathon.mesos or log-aggregator.marathon.mesos. Mesos-DNS resolves names to both the IP address of the node and the ports that the application is using. DC/OS applications and services discover the IP addresses and ports of other applications by making DNS queries or by making HTTP requests through a REST API.

Design

Mesos-DNS is designed for reliability and simplicity. It requires little configuration and is automatically pointed to the DC/OS master nodes at launch. Mesos-DNS periodically queries the masters (every 30 seconds by default) to retrieve the state of all running tasks from all running services, and to generate A and SRV DNS records for these tasks. As tasks start, finish, fail, or restart on the DC/OS cluster, Mesos-DNS updates the DNS records to reflect the latest state.

If the Mesos-DNS process fails, systemd automatically restarts it. Mesos-DNS then retrieves the latest state from the DC/OS masters and begins serving DNS requests without additional coordination. Mesos-DNS does not require consensus mechanisms, persistent storage, or a replicated log because it does not implement heartbeats, health monitoring, or lifetime management for applications; this functionality is already built into the DC/OS masters, agents, and services.