14 May 09 Asterisk and Amazon EC2 – Amoocon Presentation

I recently gave a presentation at the Amoocon convention, held in Rostock, Germany – about Asterisk and Amazon EC2. Below is a medium quality video of that presentation:

or you may download it here:
Amazon EC2 and Asterisk video files

Tags: AGI, Amazon, Amazon EC2, Asterisk, Cloud computing, Dialers, economy, GreenfieldTech, php, PHPAGI, Virtualization, VMWARE

01 Apr 09 GreenfieldTech announces the general availability of app_cashmaker for Asterisk

Udim, Israel. April 1, 2009 -GreenfieldTech Ltd., a leading provider of Asterisk solutions and Asterisk training services in Israel, today announced the availability of it’s patented app_cashmaker application for the Asterisk Open Source PBX system. The CashMaker application is intended to be used by various content suppliers, wishing to distribute Audio and Video based content, utilizing their Asterisk server.

The application is built to accept an inbound call into it, then, according to various information gathered in correlation to the callers caller ID and/or inbound DID number, will correlate a relevant content stream directly to the caller. The content distributor doesn’t even have to care about what content to distribute, as the application will connect directly, via the Internet, to a remotely available RTBSP streaming server at GreenfieldTech data center.

“The app_cashmaker application is the result of the cumulative work of over 3 years in the making, testing various content business models and applications. The main problems most content distributors have is how to gather the content and manage it, with app_cashmaker, this requirement is negated, thus allowing the distributor to concentrate on what they do best – flooding the newpapers with ads and marketing material to promote their content delivery service”, says Nir Simionovich, CEO and Founder of GreenfieldTech.

Simionovich indicated that the central content distribution facility is managed via a GTBS cluster environment, implemented partially utilizing Amazon’s EC2 and S3 structures, while utilizing GreenfieldTech’s proprietary streaming and clustering technologies. Currently, GreenfieldTech had submitted 10 different provisional patents, relating to the technologies comprising the app_cashmaker application and service. GreenfieldTech marketing team had indicated that initial beta trials had showed an increase in content availability, via the GreenfieldTech BSC Cloud facilityof over 40% with an increase of almost 80% in content delivery success.

Simionovich estimates that by the year 2010, over 20,000,000 will use the GreenfieldTech app_cashmaker facility, disrupting completely the way mobile, audio and video content is distributed around the world.

Asterisk is the world’s leading open source PBX telephony engine, and telephony applications solution. It offers unmatched flexibility in a world previously dominated by expensive proprietary communications systems. The Asterisk solution offers a rich and flexible voice infrastructure that integrates seamlessly with both traditional and advanced VoIP telephony systems. For more information on Asterisk visit http://www.asterisk.org 

For more information, please refer to the GreenfieldTech website at http://www.greenfieldtech.net.

Tags: AGI, Amazon, ami, Asterisk, Cloud computing, CONTENT, digium, EC2, MOBILE, S3, STREAMING

18 Feb 09 Asterisk AGI Programming – New Book

Well, it’s finally out – my new book that is

Some of you already know, but over the past year I’ve been busy writing a new book. This time it’s a book for Asterisk developers, especially tailored to PHP developers wishing to utilizing the PHPAGI framework. The book is out from Packt Publishing (Like my old AsteriskNOW book) and is updated with all the recent changes in Asterisk – including version 1.6.X and DAHDI.

If you like my work with Asterisk and would like to read more of my work, go ahead and get an electronic version of this book. I know it’s a little self promoting, by hey, it never hurts does it?

I’ve included a chapter on how to build a complete project from scratch, detailing the various analysis steps and various paradigms required to develop a fully functional Asterisk based application. I believe that even experienced Asterisk developers will benefit from this book.

Tags: AGI, Asterisk, Asterisk Book, Asterisk Developers, Book, GPL, open source, Packt Publishing, php, PHPAGI

15 Dec 08 Thoughts of Virtualization – Part III – Multiple Asterisk Gateways

While this post is titled “Thoughts of Virtualizaiton”, the applications described can be easily applied to non-VM type installations.

Virtualization is a wonderful tool, it enables rapid growth and rapid deployment of new servers and services. However, just like any other platform that tends to grow across the time line, it poses the same annoying issue of managing a large system, especially when dealing with Asterisk based installations.

Let us imagine the following scenario: A Calling Card company while utilizes 8 different Asterisk application servers, are utilizing a single Database servers cluster and are receiving inbound calls from various sources and load balanced across all Asterisk application servers. What I’ve described above is more or less the practice most (if not) all calling card operators deploy. No matter if the usage is A2Billing, MOR, ASTBILL – the methodology is more or less the same.

One of the bigger issues with such an installation is debugging of a running session, more over, the ability to debug a session after it is finished. This situation is caused by a simple, yet annoying issue, we are operating within a “zero-knowledge” system, where we have no precognition of where a specific call will be handled utilizing our cluster. Now, if you are an experienced sysadmin, you would most probably do the following:

1. SSH to all your Asterisk servers.
2. Tile all consoles on your desktop.
3. Start the test – and hope your eyes are fast enough to capture the right gateway.

Well, this is the normal practice with most people – but I have to admit it’s kind of annoying. Now, let’s imagine that we are now building our system from scratch, we’re not using A2Billing or any of the other Open Source products, we simply build our own application framework. So, what do we need to do in order to keep track of our system correctly?

Step 1: Consolidate

Consolidate the messages coming from each of your gateways to a single logging facility. The best track would be to utilize some form of Syslog facility. For example, all the scripts and network services that I develop utilize a clear and concise interface to syslog. I usually re-direct the syslog facility that I use to an external server, thus, I get all the logs on a single syslog file system.

If you are worried about I/O issues on the syslog server, you can always create a “syslog-proxy” using tools such as memcached or others.

Step 2: Identify

Your syslog write function should always include a prefix indicating the name of the generating Asterisk server. For example, have something like the following prefix your syslog entry:

Dec 14 21:51:32 pbx [PBX01/6d6d6423a2244aa71980e5a5b437919e/check_pincode[22537]: agiParameters: check_pincode

While the syslog facility will include your generating hostname, when duplication VM’s, this would be a really good practice.

Step 3: Analyse

Once your logs are consolidated to a single environment, it should be fairly simple for you to go about and analyse these in a pre-defined routine. There is little to gain from analysing the logs on-the-fly, but analysing it every 5/10/15 minutes will prove worthwhile.

Step 4: Audit

Auditing is good – as long as you keep a clear view of what you audit and what you don’t. Audit key points in your application to a database can save you a whole lot of time of debugging – just make sure your audit is clear.

Keep the above in mind and you should be just fine creating any scale of platform.

Tags: AGI, Asterisk, scaling, syslog, Virtual Server, VM, VMWARE

05 Aug 08 Working on a new book ….

As most of you reading this blog, you must know that I’ve published an AsteriskNOW book early this year. I’m happy to say that I’ve received numerous emails since the publication of the book, all asking various questions about Asterisk in general and AsteriskNOW in particular.

Most of the questions that I received were related to the development of AGI and AMI scripts, and how to utilize Asterisk as an application layer platform. This inspired me to work on additonal title, to complete my previous book. I’m currently working on an Asterisk Developers guide, for AGI/CTI development with Asterisk. The book serves as a complete guide, summarizing the various aspects of developing AGI/CTI applications with Asterisk, while, enjoying various additions from my day-to-day experience with AGI/CTI development with Asterisk. The book is written as an eye-opener for experienced developers, wishing to make their transition to AGI/CTI development, and teaches them how to avoid the most common mistakes of early day AGI developers.

I’ll be be updating the blog with my progress. Currently, chapters 1 through 5 are complete, covering the basic aspects of dial-plan and AGI development. More information will be released soon.

Tags: AGI, Asterisk, AsteriskNOW, Book, CTI, Development, PacktPublishing, php