[asterisk-dev] AstriDevCon ideas

[Dan Jenkins]

Unfortunately I won't be at DevCon this year (I'll be on a plane flying
from West to East US) - I will of course try to listen in etc but I'd like
to raise one new idea and another maintenance issue to be discussed at
DevCon.

Idea:

I find it tough to get people (even myself) to build actual production
applications with the ARI because of the nature of how we connect to the
ARI - one websocket from an application into Asterisk. Over the years this
has lead to proxies sitting in the middle, those being maintained (or
unmaintained due to maintainers moving on and no longer developing the
codebase etc). Last year we discussed making the ARI work with more than
one websocket connected with the same app name - as far as I'm aware this
hasn't happened yet.

Working with Drachtio (a SIP Proxy) a lot this year has made me realise we
were overcomplicating the matter. Drachtio has the idea of inbound and
outbound connections (apps that are addressable by Drachtio) - its very
much like ARI. Inbound connections - Node app makes a TCP connection to
Drachtio and traffic is sent down it. Good for development of an idea maybe
but not good for production scaling - exactly the same as ARI. Drachtio
also has the concept for outbound connections - whenever a SIP dialog (or
whatever messaging) needs to go to an application, Drachtio makes an
outbound connection to an app - 10 Drachtios can all make outbound
connections to a TCP loadbalancer and could talk to 500 Node apps -
ridiculous numbers but hopefully you see the point. Its easy to scale in
comparison to what we have in ARI today.

Dialplan (yes I know.... after I asked to not have to even write Stasis()
any more....) would look like.... - thanks for that! (side note - can we
redirect from one stasis app to another yet?)

Stasis("app") - no change
Stasis("wss://foo.com") - if the string is a URI then make an outbound
connection to it. If it doesn't accept the websocket in a timeout period
then fail it so you could go to another line of dialplan where you could go
to another Stasis app

Stasis("wss://foo.com") - fail
Stasis("wss://bar.com") - yay success

I think this is really flexible and simple and allows us to utilise
existing load balancers that are already available like in AWS or HaProxy -
no need to maintain a proxy codebase any more.

You should be able to add metadata to the uri as uri parameters too
Stasis("wss://bar.com?uuid=foo-bar-foo-bar")

Probably opens a can of worms with auth mechanisms etc.... maybe you should
be able to set variables before the stasis call to have them included? I
don't know...

Of course, the client libraries would need updated to support creating a
websocket server instead of a websocket client

Maintenance item

the old swagger definitions of the ARI need updated. We need to get off an
old definition format and at least move to open API. I know many people who
have tried to say fix something in the node module and given up because
trying to get setup is difficult. If we're not going to keep up with
standards then we should just not use a standard thats out there (I don't
agree with this)

Looking forward to seeing as many of you as I can at Astricon

Dan
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