DDI: Managing IP Allocation with an Open-Source DDI#

Speakers: Marco Martinez

• Why: Commercial DDI suites (Infoblox-class) are the default answer to unified DNS/DHCP/IPAM, but they're priced out of reach for smaller environments and lock addressing data in a proprietary management plane. IPAM is squarely in the PM's remit, and this is a practical build-vs-buy analysis plus a working reference architecture.
• What: A survey of the DDI landscape followed by a concrete argument (backed by a prototype) that a "reasonably good" open-source DDI can be assembled with reasonable effort by composing three existing open-source products rather than writing any of DNS, DHCP, or IPAM from scratch.
• How: The requirements are a single API over DNS, DHCP and IPAM, full transparency, HA, and operations driven by data. The slides compare two integration approaches: Approach I glues components together but suffers from divergent automation tooling and configuration-consistency problems; Approach II (the one that works) is a single event-driven configuration plane over separate components. The stack referenced in the sources: Infrahub (OpsMill) as the data/source-of-truth layer, ISC Kea for DHCP, and PowerDNS for DNS, with everything running on containers or Linux.
• Where applicable: General technique, org-agnostic — but the speaker is explicit about the trade-offs: no single vendor supporting the whole stack, HA is your own problem, complexity is likely higher than a traditional DDI, and there's no hardware-appliance option. Best fit for teams that already run containerized infrastructure and want ownership of their components; a prototype ("DDI Version 1") is on GitHub.