[asterisk-biz] Announcement: Kamailio becomes systemd-rtc-server

[Daniel-Constantin Mierla]

On 01/04/15 06:14, Alex Balashov wrote:
> For immediate release:
>
> ATLANTA, GA (1 April 2015)--Evariste Systems LLC, an Atlanta-based
> software vendor specialising in Kamailio-based service delivery
> solutions for the VoIP ITSP market, is pleased to announce that it, in
> collaboration with Red Hat Software and Ringfree Communications, has
> finalised the absorption of the Kamailio SIP Server into the 'systemd'
> system management platform for Linux. The new component shall be called
> 'systemd-rtc-server', or 'Systemd Real-Time Communication Server'.
>
> Alex Balashov, principal of Evariste and leader of the tri-vendor
> collaboration effort, will officially announce the handover of the
> reigns of the Kamailio project to the personal leadership of Lennart
> Poettering at the upcoming Systemd Real Time Communications World
> conference, to be held in Berlin on 27-29 May of this year.
>
> John Knight, Director of GNOME 3 Integration and part-time usability
> consultant at Ringfree Communications, based in Hendersonville, North
> Carolina, summarised the triumphs of the long-standing integration
> effort.
>
> Remarked Knight:
>
> "The industry has recognised for years that a SIP proxy is a basic
> building block in the 'init' subsystem of any Linux host. In this age of
> multimedia communication with voice and video, it was a travesty that
> systemd handled time synchronisation, network configuration, login
> management, logging, and console, but not SIP message routing."
>
> Sean McCord, a veteran partner at Atlanta-based integrator CyCORE &
> Docker, was quick to concur:
>
> "SIP calls are much easier to troubleshoot with binary logs. Combined
> with packet captures of TLS-encrypted WebRTC calls, systemd-journald is
> the ultimate call setup troubleshooting methodology of the responsive,
> kinetic enterprise."
>
> To support the integration of Kamailio into the ecosystem of every major
> Linux distribution, Evariste has released new 'dbus_api' and
> 'pulseaudio' modules for the project.
>
> Balashov stated, "We fully expect to use the D-Bus API to achieve
> gnome-session integration with systemd-rtc-server-usrloc, but we aren't
> going to leave Windows users behind; KamailioSvcHost.exe will support
> Domain Controller policies for G.722 in Active Directory forests."
>
> Despite an aggressive delivery timeline by the tri-vendor consortium
> behind systemd-rtc-server, industry commentators have widely lambasted
> the fact that it took so long for Kamailio to become integrated into
> systemd. Fred Posner, solutions architect at The Palner Group in Fort
> Lauderdale, Florida, recently wrote in a widely-publicised blog post:
>
> "sr-dev have been keeping their heads in the sand for too long. For
> years now, it has been completely obvious and self-evident to anyone
> with half a brain that all kinds of VoIP software should be included in
> systemd. It's a basic building block of the whole OS, having absorbed
> functionality previously provided by all kinds of packages like
> util-linux and wireless-tools."
>
> John Knight of Ringfree accepted the criticism readily, but advocated a
> forward-thinking orientation focused on breaking with the uncertainty of
> the past:
>
> "In the absence of a SIP component for routing calls to the PSTN, some
> people thought, 'systemd has no clear direction apart from the whims of
> its developers, and is a perpetually moving goal post.' Well, a SIP
> server should put an end to that whole discussion; that's exactly what
> was missing, and now that we have systemd-rtc-server, we've eliminated
> all doubts about the coherence, conceptual integrity and finality of
> systemd."
>
>
Given it is a rather technical community around here, I would expected a
bit of engineering approach when announcing the achievement. Shortly,
here are some of the facts.

Any interaction with or inside systemd is now *simple*, using the well
know publish-subscribe-notify mechanism, glued with xcap. If you want to
restart a daemon, you have to subscribe to its state, publish the fact
you want to restart, and systemd will notify you if the operations is
done or not according to permissions rules in xcap.

Worth to mention that the real reason of forking linux kernel by systemd
(see http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20150330#community) is to
*simplefy* it by migrating to publish-subscribe-notify-xcap for
everything that requires real time interaction. Forget about the complex
file permissions strange 3-4 digits which are not in e164 format, thus
hard to remember! Do you want to read a file? Just subscribe to it, xcap
knows who you are and what you can do or not, notifying you promptly
with the content from the file or /dev/null.

*Simplefying* everything is the future!

Cheers,
Daniel

-- 
Daniel-Constantin Mierla
http://twitter.com/#!/miconda - http://www.linkedin.com/in/miconda
Kamailio World Conference, May 27-29, 2015
Berlin, Germany - http://www.kamailioworld.com