Don’t Replicate – Federate

For many years, the question of high availability had always circled the same old subject of replication – how do we replicate data across nodes? how do we replicate the configuration to stay unified across nodes? Is active-active truly better than active-passive? and most importantly, what happens beyond the two node scenario?

Federating Asterisk – truth or myth?

During this years’ Asterisk Developers’ Conference, one of the subjects I’ve raised an issue for Asterisk is: “Federating Multiple Asterisk Instances”. Now, for the seasoned Asterisk user/developer, the answer would be simple – use Kamailio/OpenSIPS for that scalability, and use Asterisk as a Media Gateway or application server.

Astricon, Vegas and Geekness

So, Astricon 2014 is over and behind now and I’m now sitting at the Holiday Inn in Chicago. I have to admit that moving from the RedRock resort and Casino to the Holiday Inn in Chicago – talk about a mind blowing change. Just to give a general idea, the bath room in Vegas was roughly the size of the entire room here (mental note to self – next time order something better via BA miles).

The Asterisk scaleability Unicorn

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.

Stanley is gone – Welcome PHPARI

In my previous post I’ve announced the bootstrapping of a new PHP project, called “Project Stanley”. Project Stanley was an attempt at creating a Asterisk ARI developer kit, based upon the PHP programming language (yes, I call it a programming language).

Asterisk ARI – What AGI/AMI should have been

Asterisk ARI – for a seasoned AGI/AMI developer like myself, ARI is a serious mind warp. Why is it a mind warp? simple, it’s all the things we wanted AGI to be, and the reliability we wanted AMI to have, minus all the work around we needed to do – in order to get similar functionality in the past.

Building your Asterisk based Business – Part I

Since the inception of GreenfieldTech, back in 2007, we’ve assisted over 40 different VoIP companies to bootstrap their activities and launch their products. During that period, some of these companies had become a great success and some had disappeared from the face of the planet. This series of posts will bring the story of some of them – and we’ll try to analyze what made each company into a success or a failure.

Hardware Review: Allo.Com GSM Card

Honestly, this is something I should have already done a long time ago. About 4 months ago, Allo.Com approached us (GreenfieldTech) to write a review about some of their products. After they agreed to the terms – mainly that they we’ll publish our findings, good or bad – we had to move offices, so everything kind’a went into limbo. Last week, finally, we got around to start reviewing the hardware. We currently started with 2 products, the Allo.COM GSM card (http://www.allo.com/gsm-card.html) and the Allo.Com MegaPBX (http://www.allo.com/megapbx-line.html).

Technology? Religion? or just pure Ego?

Open Source – What really drives it? is the desire to change and create something new? is it a firm belief in the idea that knowledge wants to be free and that software should roam the world? or when you boil down – is it just plain Ego?

Extreme Asterisk Cloud Performance – Part I

Here’s a challenging question for the Asterisk technical savvy of you… What is the top performance you can squeeze out of an Asterisk box, running on Amazon EC2 – or to that extent, a cloud infrastructure? If you scout the Internet, you may find various answers – however, most of them aren’t backed up by real numbers or real information,made accessible in a normal readable form.
Recently, we’ve become heavily involved in a project requiring massive usage of cloud based infrastructure. I won’t go into details as to what the project is or what we are doing, however, I felt that some interesting facts about Asterisk 11.0.1 and Cloud infrastructure can be shared with the rest of you.