Self-host Designate
2024.2-eolOpenStack DNS as a Service for multi-tenant zone management
- Stars
- 180
- Requires
- Keystone
What is Designate?
Designate is the DNS as a Service component of OpenStack, providing multi-tenant DNS zone and record management through a REST API with Keystone authentication. It includes a command-line client plugin and a Horizon dashboard plugin. Designate can automatically create DNS records from Nova compute and Neutron network actions. It supports multiple DNS server backends including Bind9 and PowerDNS 4. The service consists of several components: designate-api, designate-central, designate-producer, designate-worker, and designate-mdns. It is deployed as part of an OpenStack cloud using manual installation on RHEL/CentOS or Ubuntu, or via OpenStack-Ansible and Kolla-Ansible deployment tools.
Should you self-host Designate?
Designate scores 53/100 on selfhost.directory (how scoring works) and ranks #19 of 41 in DNS. It has 180 GitHub stars.
It shipped 1 stable release in the past year. The latest, 2024.1-eom, came out on 31 October 2025.
Setup is advanced: plan for several services and some ongoing maintenance. It is Apache-2.0-licensed and written mostly in Python.
Its closest alternative on selfhost.directory is Pi-hole (87/100, 61 535 stars). It scores higher overall, so compare the two before you pick. See Designate vs Pi-hole side by side.
Features
- Auto-generate records
- CLI
- Horizon Dashboard
- Multiple DNS backends
- Multi-tenant DNSaaS
- REST API
Designate README
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