Digium Announces Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework at AstriCon

As day two of AstriCon 2010 began, the excitement from the exhibit hall from the previous day carried over into the keynote hall, where Digium’s (News - Alert) director of software technologies Kevin Fleming made the company’s biggest announcement since the birth of Asterisk (News - Alert) more than a decade ago.

Specifically, citing a desire to enable even more flexibility than the Asterisk platform already does, Fleming officially announced the Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (Asterisk SCF), Digium’s newest open source project.

Differentiating between Asterisk and Asterisk SCF, he likened Asterisk to a car kit, which allows building of a car with substantial opportunity for customization. On the other hand, the new Asterisk SCF is more like a train, he says, where train cars can be added or removed as needed. Furthermore, taking advantage of the latest trends in distributed systems and cloud computing, Asterisk SCF allows those different components to be located anywhere. They do not need to be in the same data center, let alone the same rack or server.

Asterisk SCF seeks to meet four requirements for businesses looking to deploy open source communications solutions:

• Performance
• Scalability
• Fault tolerance
• Extensibility

The project addresses demand from the Asterisk community to be able to leverage Asterisk in larger and more complex deployment scenarios. Digium has for some maintained that Asterisk is scalable and resilient and capable of providing enterprise-grade communications. This announcement takes its capabilities to the next level, bringing to the open source community a new platform that address the communications needs of businesses today and into the future.

According to Fleming, “We haven’t even finished designing all of what SCF needs to do.”

In true open source spirit, he added, “We want you to get involved. The goal is to make Asterisk SCF the platform you want to use to build incredibly powerful communications applications.”

Judging from the response from those in attendance, that isn’t going to take long. A developer release of Asterisk SCF will be available later today, but will be very basic.
Erik Linask (News - Alert) is Group Editorial Director of TMC, which brings news and compelling feature articles, podcasts, and videos to 2,000,000 visitors each month. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Erik Linask