How Cloudflare analyzes 1M DNS queries per second
On Friday, we announced DNS analytics for all Cloudflare customers. Because of our scale –– by the time you’ve finished reading this, Cloudflare DNS will have handled millions of DNS queries –– we had to be creative in our implementation. In this post, we’ll describe the systems that make up DNS Analytics which help us comb through trillions of these logs each month.
How logs come in from the edge

Cloudflare already has a data pipeline for HTTP logs. We wanted to utilize what we could of that system for the new DNS analytics. Every time one of our edge services gets an HTTP request, it generates a structured log message in the Cap’n Proto format and sends it to a local multiplexer service. Given the volume of the data, we chose not to record the full DNS message payload, only telemetry data we are interested in such as response code, size, or query name, which has allowed us to keep only ~150 bytes on average per message. It is then fused with processing metadata such as timing information and exceptions triggered during query processing. The benefit of fusing data and metadata at the edge is that we can spread Continue reading
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OCP started with compute, but networking has become the most popular working group.