[asterisk-users] Asterisk 'Hosting'

[Douglas Garstang]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matt Riddell (NZ) [mailto:matt.riddell at sineapps.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2006 1:35 PM
> To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
> Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Asterisk 'Hosting'
> 
> 
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Douglas Garstang wrote:
> 
> > It's obvious that Asterisk was designed more for the 
> enterprise (ie a single company), rather than for the carrier 
> (ie multiple companies). It's a bit hard to explain here, but 
> even with more than a few companies, the config files and 
> dial plan start to become horribly complex.
> > 
> > Our first customer has 15 contexts (right now) in 
> extensions.conf (we've broken each company into a separate 
> files included from extensions.conf and sip.conf for some 
> manageability).  At several hundred companies, that's several 
> thousand contexts. We have three Asterisk boxes, and can add 
> more, but the config is (almost) idential between them for 
> redundancy, and this means that each Asterisk box has to have 
> a dialplan configured for all companies.
> 
> And so you're thinking it would be better to run several hundred
> Asterisk instances?!
> 
> Good luck.
> 
> I think your project would work a lot better if you worked like this:
> 
> 1) Get requirements
> 2) Map features and limitations of products
> 3) Write PseudoCode
> 4) Work out ways to load test your ideas
> 5) Write real code
> 6) Load test again with real code
> 
> Hint: Layer your system so that each component is not doing too much
> 
> Hint #2: Read: http://www.astricon.net/files/David_Zimmer_EUR06.pdf

Interesting, but there's no meat. Do you know if they've actually implemented this yet, or are still designing it? This is essentially the same thing as we are doing (except I'm expected to do it all myself), except we aren't using realtime because it's not documented, and the asterisk dialplan language isn't advanced enough to deliver all the feature sets we need. We have a 2000+ line python script that handles all call routing logic.