How AI is applied across API Evangelist and APIs.io. Read my AI disclosure →
API Evangelist API Evangelist
Discovery
Learnings
Guidance
Toolbox
Alignment
API Evangelist LLC
CoreDNS website screenshot

CoreDNS

CoreDNS is a CNCF graduated DNS server written in Go that serves as the default DNS service for Kubernetes clusters. It is flexible and extensible through a plugin architecture, supporting DNS-based service discovery, forwarding, caching, and integration with etcd, Kubernetes, and other backends. CoreDNS can serve as an authoritative DNS server or a recursive resolver, with HTTP plugins exposing health, readiness, and Prometheus metrics endpoints for Kubernetes operations.

agent aware

Limited machine-readable signal and partial portal coverage — documentation a human can read, but little a machine or agent can consume without scraping.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles CoreDNS the way a machine reads it — 21 machine-readable artifacts across 2 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — CoreDNS scores 39.1/100 (thin), with a separate agent-readiness read of 26/100 (agent aware). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance. Every facet and dimension name is a link: it opens that measurement's page on APIs.io, where the rating runs across the whole catalog — the exact checks that feed it, how every profiled provider distributes on it, and who is at the top of it.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0
CoreDNS Kin Score — API readiness rating by API Evangelist

Put this on your own site. The badge is drawn live from CoreDNS's current Kin Score — paste it once and it updates itself every time the score is recomputed. It follows your visitor's light or dark setting, and it links back here so anyone who sees it can read the full breakdown.

<!-- Kin Score · API Evangelist -->
<a href="https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/coredns/"
   title="CoreDNS on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
  <img src="https://apis.io/badge/coredns.svg"
       alt="CoreDNS Kin Score — API readiness rating by API Evangelist" width="150" height="150" loading="lazy">
</a>

More shapes, themes and sizes → · Score as JSON · How badges work

How we profile CoreDNS

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for CoreDNS. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 5

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

CoreDNS DNS Interface

CoreDNS implements the standard DNS protocol (RFC 1035) serving both UDP and TCP queries. In Kubernetes, it resolves service names to cluster IPs, headless services to pod IPs, ...

CoreDNS Plugin API

The CoreDNS plugin framework allows extending DNS server functionality through a chain of plugins defined in the Corefile configuration. External plugins can be written in Go to...

CoreDNS Health API

Health check endpoints used by Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes to assess the operational state of the CoreDNS process.

CoreDNS Metrics API

Prometheus-compatible metrics endpoints exposing DNS query statistics, cache performance, latency histograms, and build information.

CoreDNS Ready API

Readiness check endpoints that indicate whether CoreDNS plugins have finished initializing and are ready to serve DNS queries.

Open Collections 6

Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

API Collection

OPEN COLLECTION

CoreDNS Health API

OPEN COLLECTION

CoreDNS Health API

OPEN COLLECTION

CoreDNS Metrics API

OPEN COLLECTION

CoreDNS Health Ready API

OPEN COLLECTION

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the things the Kin Score reads for access clarity — renamed from commercial clarity in rubric 0.12, because a free statutory interface has access terms and no commercial ones.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Coredns Plans Pricing

1 plans

PLANS

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Coredns Rate Limits

3 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Semantic Vocabularies 1

JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Coredns Context

0 classes · 8 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 3

Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.

CoreDNS API Rules

8 rules · 6 errors · 2 warnings

SPECTRAL

CoreDNS API Rules

6 rules · 5 warnings

SPECTRAL

CoreDNS API Rules

8 rules · 5 errors · 2 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 1

Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

CoreDNS Corefile Configuration

1 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Security Posture 1

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Coredns Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DNSSEC

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Coredns Agentic Access

3 operations

3 operations · 0 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Every other property we hold for CoreDNS — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Get Started 1

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Documentation 3

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

Design & Contract 2

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

Operate 3

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Commercial 1

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

Company 2

The organization behind the API

Other 1

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/coredns · machine-readable index on apis.io

Where this information came from

This is an independent, third-party profile of CoreDNS, published by API Evangelist. We do not operate, host, resell, or support these APIs, and we are not affiliated with or endorsed by the company unless stated above. Everything here is built from publicly available information — the company's own site, developer portal, documentation, public repositories, and the specifications it publishes for public use. Nothing is obtained by breaching a system, defeating an access control, or using credentials.

The Kin Score and Agent Readiness rating are independently calculated assessments of a company's public API artifacts, scored against a published rubric. They are not certifications, endorsements, security assessments, or audits.

Corrections, re-scores, and removal are free — no partnership or purchase required, and you do not need to justify the request. A removed company is recorded as unrated, never scored zero for having asked. Acknowledgement within one business day; removal within two.

info@apievangelist.com · Read the full data-sourcing policy →
On a security or compliance team? Put security in the subject line and you will get a person, not a form — we will tell you exactly which public URLs this profile was built from.