How we improved DNS record build speed by more than 4,000x

Cloudflare has significantly improved its DNS record propagation speed, reducing the time it takes for changes submitted to their API to be reflected in DNS query responses. The company's previous pipeline had a bottleneck at the Zone Builder stage, which was responsible for collecting and organizing records to be written to their global network. To address this issue, Cloudflare implemented per-record builds instead of full builds, resulting in an average 150x speed improvement. This change has benefited all Cloudflare customers, with larger zones experiencing even greater reductions in build times. The company plans to continue improving its DNS propagation pipeline by eliminating full builds altogether and introducing a batching system for record changes.