Asterisk SCF – Pause
David Duffett September 14th, 2012
Working with the Asterisk community is a privilege which comes with responsibilities – and today I bring news of something that has not worked out as we anticipated it might.
The Asterisk SCF project was started a couple of years ago (you may remember an early demo at AstriCon 2010, in Washington, DC) and since then work has been on-going. While SCF was never intended to be a replacement for Asterisk, it did represent an architectural advancement for open source communications. Currently there is a working version of the code that is publicly available.
During this time period, Asterisk has also evolved: you may have noticed that performance has been improved, many new features have been added, and architectural upgrades, such as improved media handling, have been incorporated into recent versions. While this clearly does not satisfy all the goals of Asterisk SCF, it certainly represents a significant step in improving the experience for Asterisk users.
Although the community has provided assistance in guiding the Asterisk SCF project, Digium has provided almost all of the software development effort. Due to the sheer complexity, the Asterisk SCF project has yet to progress to a point that enables significant development contribution from the community, and the level of resource investment required to adequately sponsor and maintain both Asterisk and Asterisk SCF is simply stretching the company too thinly.
Therefore, the decision has been made to suspend our development work on the Asterisk SCF open source project, in order to more fully support the needs of the Asterisk community.
There may well be some community developers that would like to work with the current version of Asterisk SCF so we will continue to make the code publicly available, although Digium will not be supporting the software in the same manner to which Asterisk community members are accustomed.
Valuable lessons have been learned in the process of working on Asterisk SCF. Some of these are directly applicable to Asterisk, and will be beneficial during the development of Asterisk 12 and, indeed, all future releases.
For now, we would like to thank everyone who has participated in the direction and development of Asterisk SCF for their efforts. If you are interested in discussing how some of the goals and experience from Asterisk SCF can be applied to Asterisk, please join us for the DevCon event at Astricon.
David
This is a big disappointment for those of us who were patiently waiting for the real carrier grade solution by Asterisk.
Is there any way to continue this project if some of us out there commit to monetary contributions?
I guess my question is the other direction, does this mean Digium will be doing more Switchvox development. I would love to have SV be a real commercial solution, including roadmaps, bug databases, and a feature request system.
Pejman, thank you for commenting on this post. Sorry about the delay in responding. As mentioned in the blog post, the code – as it stands right now – is freely available for any individual or group to run with, and so can be continued as those wishing to take it forward see fit.
When you say ‘real carrier grade solution’, what specific features are you looking for?
thanks David to inform us .
I’m looking for better clustering capability with the ability to migrate a call to another server in the event that a server dies, and the ability to share a queue across multiple servers.
[...] that in mind, Digium has made what we believe was a wise decision in scrapping the Asterisk SCF project. You may recall this was the engineering effort to build a fully-redundant Asterisk platform so [...]