4 ms·

Twilio uses Asterisk? Is this true? If so my respect for both their technical chops and pain tolerance went up...

by runT1ME 16y ago

stanleydrew 16y ago
This is absolutely true. I think Tropo does as well.
- akalsey 16y ago
  No, Tropo uses Prism, Voxeo's enterprise grade SIP application server: http://www.voxeo.com/prism/ http://www.voxeo.com/prism/. Tropo's application layer is also open source and will run on any SIP servelet server.
  - runT1ME 16y ago
    Is 'enterprise grade' referring to a specific technical claim made by Voxeo or more of just a substitute for 'often used in the enterprise'?
    - visionik 16y ago
      Thank you for asking. "Enterprise grade" can be a vague marketing term. This is what Voxeo means when we say PRISM is "enterprise grade": 1. Fault tolerant: Including the ability to do state-full failover of applications from one PRISM server instance to another. 2. Scalable: Proven ability to scale to over 25,000 calls per server. 3. High performance: Proven ability to scale to over 800 call setups (new calls) per second per server. 4. Standards-based: PRISM implements the Java SIP servlet standards (JSR-289) and Java Media Control standard (JSR-309). PRISM applications can run unmodified on similar platforms from Oracle, IBM, and Redhat - and vice versa. 5. Support: PRISM is backed by a company with guaranteed 24x7 support, under 20 minute response times, over 150 employees, world-wide offices, financial stability, and 10 years of experience. On top of that, yes, PRISM is often used in the enterprise and by service providers. :) PRISM is also used for everything we do at Voxeo. All of our products and services, including Tropo, are built on top of PRISM.
- visionik 16y ago
  as akalsey said, Tropo is built on PRISM. http://www.voxeo.com/prism http://www.voxeo.com/prism PRISM is a highly scalable, reliable, and extensible communications application server. It's a very proven platform and is used by several of the largest consumer and commercial VoIP providers. It's also used in Microsoft's Tellme service and is the foundation of all of Voxeo's products and services. Asterisk can be painful, but they have a new ground-up project in very-early (pre-beta) stage called Asterisk SCF that is designed to achieve PRISM-like capabilities.
jsgoecke 16y ago
Yes, to date Twilio has used Asterisk along with OpenSER. Asterisk has its place, as I was personally involved in Adhearsion (http://adhearsion.com http://adhearsion.com) and now Voxeo Labs sponsors the project. The place for Asterisk today is not for providing large scale distributed telephony services. Simply the wrong tool for that, which Twilio has learned the hard way. This is why Digium has created a new project: Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF - http://www.asterisk.org/asterisk/scf http://www.asterisk.org/asterisk/scf). Although Asterisk SCF is still in prototype stage and 12-18 months from a fully baked alpha. An interesting approach, but not here yet. Folks from Twilio have confirmed they are trying to move away from Asterisk, I suspect to Freeswitch. While Freeswitch has better scale, it suffers from some of the same fundamental architectural issues Asterisk has for large distributed telephony applications. Full disclosure, I am the VP of Innovation at Voxeo Labs, the group responsible for Tropo. Further, I was invited by Digium and attended their closed discussion and launch of the Asterisk SCF platform in Huntsville last spring.
- runT1ME 16y ago
  >Simply the wrong tool for that, which Twilio has learned the hard way. Citation from something they said, or just deducting this the same way I did? (experience with Asterisk...) >While Freeswitch has better scale, it suffers from some of the same fundamental architectural issues Asterisk has for large distributed telephony applications. What are the same 'fundamental' architectural issues? They've seem to taken quite a different approach, or do you just feel C is the wrong way to go for a highly concurrent, scalable system?
  - jsgoecke 16y ago
    Well, I shared a taxi from Astricon to the airport in Phoenix in 2009 with two founders of Twilio. This was after their presentation on Asterisk at Astricon: http://www.slideshare.net/twilio/reinventing-the-dialplan-slides-from-twilios-astricon-2009-talk http://www.slideshare.net/twilio/reinventing-the-dialplan-sl... Plus they have said publicly in other places that they built upon Asterisk. As for Freeswitch. It is a great platform. Both Freeswitch and Asterisk may be made to scale, but it is not trivial and takes a fair amount of time and resources to do so and then to maintain over time. The issue for both of them is that the applications and media services tend to run in the same process. Digium's answer to this is SCF which is now under active development. The approach we take (and others like Oracle, JBoss, Avaya, etc) is to deploy apps in SIP Servlet containers (Java) and your media in dedicated media servers (C/C++ for example). Employing a clear demarcation between application logic and media processing using MRCP (http://bit.ly/32Bnpu http://bit.ly/32Bnpu) between them. Now, of course Freeswitch does have 'Mod unimrcp' (http://bit.ly/hmqvdq http://bit.ly/hmqvdq) which may be used to talk to our media servers (http://bit.ly/f9lUH3 http://bit.ly/f9lUH3) and turn Freeswitch into an application platform. But when most people think of Freeswitch, they think of the equivalent of Asterisk and deploy that way.

Twilio uses Asterisk? Is this true? If so my respect for both their technical chops and pain tolerance went up...

by runT1ME 16y ago

Twilio uses Asterisk? Is this true? If so my respect for both their technical chops and pain tolerance went up...

stanleydrew 16y ago

This is absolutely true. I think Tropo does as well.

akalsey 16y ago
No, Tropo uses Prism, Voxeo's enterprise grade SIP application server: http://www.voxeo.com/prism/ http://www.voxeo.com/prism/. Tropo's application layer is also open source and will run on any SIP servelet server.
- runT1ME 16y ago
  Is 'enterprise grade' referring to a specific technical claim made by Voxeo or more of just a substitute for 'often used in the enterprise'?
  - visionik 16y ago
    Thank you for asking. "Enterprise grade" can be a vague marketing term. This is what Voxeo means when we say PRISM is "enterprise grade": 1. Fault tolerant: Including the ability to do state-full failover of applications from one PRISM server instance to another. 2. Scalable: Proven ability to scale to over 25,000 calls per server. 3. High performance: Proven ability to scale to over 800 call setups (new calls) per second per server. 4. Standards-based: PRISM implements the Java SIP servlet standards (JSR-289) and Java Media Control standard (JSR-309). PRISM applications can run unmodified on similar platforms from Oracle, IBM, and Redhat - and vice versa. 5. Support: PRISM is backed by a company with guaranteed 24x7 support, under 20 minute response times, over 150 employees, world-wide offices, financial stability, and 10 years of experience. On top of that, yes, PRISM is often used in the enterprise and by service providers. :) PRISM is also used for everything we do at Voxeo. All of our products and services, including Tropo, are built on top of PRISM.
visionik 16y ago
as akalsey said, Tropo is built on PRISM. http://www.voxeo.com/prism http://www.voxeo.com/prism PRISM is a highly scalable, reliable, and extensible communications application server. It's a very proven platform and is used by several of the largest consumer and commercial VoIP providers. It's also used in Microsoft's Tellme service and is the foundation of all of Voxeo's products and services. Asterisk can be painful, but they have a new ground-up project in very-early (pre-beta) stage called Asterisk SCF that is designed to achieve PRISM-like capabilities.

jsgoecke 16y ago

Yes, to date Twilio has used Asterisk along with OpenSER. Asterisk has its place, as I was personally involved in Adhearsion (http://adhearsion.com http://adhearsion.com) and now Voxeo Labs sponsors the project. The place for Asterisk today is not for providing large scale distributed telephony services. Simply the wrong tool for that, which Twilio has learned the hard way. This is why Digium has created a new project: Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF - http://www.asterisk.org/asterisk/scf http://www.asterisk.org/asterisk/scf). Although Asterisk SCF is still in prototype stage and 12-18 months from a fully baked alpha. An interesting approach, but not here yet. Folks from Twilio have confirmed they are trying to move away from Asterisk, I suspect to Freeswitch. While Freeswitch has better scale, it suffers from some of the same fundamental architectural issues Asterisk has for large distributed telephony applications. Full disclosure, I am the VP of Innovation at Voxeo Labs, the group responsible for Tropo. Further, I was invited by Digium and attended their closed discussion and launch of the Asterisk SCF platform in Huntsville last spring.

runT1ME 16y ago
>Simply the wrong tool for that, which Twilio has learned the hard way. Citation from something they said, or just deducting this the same way I did? (experience with Asterisk...) >While Freeswitch has better scale, it suffers from some of the same fundamental architectural issues Asterisk has for large distributed telephony applications. What are the same 'fundamental' architectural issues? They've seem to taken quite a different approach, or do you just feel C is the wrong way to go for a highly concurrent, scalable system?
- jsgoecke 16y ago
  Well, I shared a taxi from Astricon to the airport in Phoenix in 2009 with two founders of Twilio. This was after their presentation on Asterisk at Astricon: http://www.slideshare.net/twilio/reinventing-the-dialplan-slides-from-twilios-astricon-2009-talk http://www.slideshare.net/twilio/reinventing-the-dialplan-sl... Plus they have said publicly in other places that they built upon Asterisk. As for Freeswitch. It is a great platform. Both Freeswitch and Asterisk may be made to scale, but it is not trivial and takes a fair amount of time and resources to do so and then to maintain over time. The issue for both of them is that the applications and media services tend to run in the same process. Digium's answer to this is SCF which is now under active development. The approach we take (and others like Oracle, JBoss, Avaya, etc) is to deploy apps in SIP Servlet containers (Java) and your media in dedicated media servers (C/C++ for example). Employing a clear demarcation between application logic and media processing using MRCP (http://bit.ly/32Bnpu http://bit.ly/32Bnpu) between them. Now, of course Freeswitch does have 'Mod unimrcp' (http://bit.ly/hmqvdq http://bit.ly/hmqvdq) which may be used to talk to our media servers (http://bit.ly/f9lUH3 http://bit.ly/f9lUH3) and turn Freeswitch into an application platform. But when most people think of Freeswitch, they think of the equivalent of Asterisk and deploy that way.