[asterisk-dev] Pain Points For Large Scale Instance Provisioning

[Michael Cargile]

Towards the end of DevCon, Matt asked if there were any pain points for 
provisioning large numbers of Asterisk instances and I mentioned I would 
talk to my colleague who handles such things. He provided this list:

* Sanity checks within Asterisk at start up and module reload. this 
include:
      -- Asterisk making sure it has the proper file permission for all 
directories that it is configured to write / read to
      -- verification that things like audio files called from Background 
/ Playback are actually there
   If these checks fail throw an error at start up / reload rather than 
when something is attempted to be accessed so these problems can be 
addressed sooner

* asterisk.conf directory variables for things like audio files are not 
always honored requiring symlinks as a work around (though this might be 
the OpenSuSE build of Asterisk causing issues)

* Reliable module reloading without core restarts
      Example: Client lets their SSL certificate lapse on an Asterisk 
server and they only figure this out when their
      agents attempting to log in using WebRTC clients. They have dozens 
or even hundreds of customer calls in queue,
      but their agents cannot login. On Asterisk 13 we cannot fix the SSL 
certs without a full restart of Asterisk
      which drops these calls. A reload of the http module does not fix 
this.


-- 
Thank you,

Michael Cargile
Developer / Senior Support Engineer
The Vicidial Group