Ok, the picture shows a donkey not a Unicorn – as you know, Unicorns are very hard to find. Asterisk Scaleability is somewhat of a unicorn – not because it doesn’t exist, it is a little tricky to do and get it right first time.

Over the years, there had been multiple approaches to building a scaleable Asterisk platform, most of them relied on the same principals: multiple Asterisk servers, singular point of entry with load balancing, single point of exit with LCR. Normally, when you talk Class-4 services (call routing, DID services, Calling Cards), this methodology would work just fine. When it comes to Class-5 (Centrex, Voicemail, Queues), things tend to get a bit more complex – but again, the basic methodology applies and remains. Over the years, we’ve seen contenders come and go, FreeSwitch, Kamailio, OpenSIPS, SER, OpenSEMS – they are all a means to an end, just get the number of concurrent calls and CPS ratio higher.

The question is this: “Is there a singular approach to Asterisk scaleability? is there a bullet proof recipe that we can use to achieve this Unicorn type configuration?” – the answer is: NO! – it is very much dependent on your application, your client side application, your general usage patterns and what kind of agility you are looking to expose to the end consumer.

Since the inception of Asterisk, and specifically since the inception of FreeSwitch, many people had been dissing Asterisk as being a monolithic environment. Many times, if you ask someone – “what does that mean?” – you would end up with a very googly eyed face, not really understanding what monolithic means. Yes, Asterisk is by definition a monolithic environment, which means, it was designed to work a self enclosed unit. If you think about it, how many PBX systems do you know that are not monolithic. The question in that case is: “If Asterisk is monolithic, how can we scale and expand it? how can we build something really big from something like Asterisk?”.

In martial arts you always learn to use your opponents strength as their weakness, as your weakness as your strength. If Asterisk’s monolithic nature is its weakness, let’s try and make it into its strength. How do we do that? we make sure that any decision (process, calculation, state handling, etc) that is cross platform is handled outside of Asterisk, while keeping call control and media handling at the monolithic layer. This yields two distinct advantages: we can develop our cross platform logic at ease, without impacting our Asterisk development process, we can develop our Asterisk logic as a singular unit and expand it as required, simply by adding more computation units horizontally. In network and platform design there is a simple rule of thumb – growing deep is complex, growing wide is simple. If the question of scaleability becomes a question of brute forcing additional computation resources, the issue is simple. If scaling out requires changes in the computational structure – you’ve done something wrong.

Over the years, we’ve developed several large scale Asterisk platforms. These had recently hit the combined user number of 15 Million, with over 850 Million minutes served on all platforms combined. Some of these are carrier oriented, some are social oriented – but in all of them the scaleabilty factor was important. In other words, the Unicorn is out there, we’ve actually managed to find it several times, each time somewhere else – but it was always grazing in similar locations. If you keep looking for the bulls, you will surely miss the Unicorn standing at the right of the road – right next to you.