

Scaling Twilio - stanleydrew
http://www.twilio.com/engineering/2011/10/03/scaling-twilio/

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runT1ME
I always get a little suspicious about how little Twilio talks about their SIP
stack. Barely a mention of it except for 'Asterisk/FreeSwitch/JSR289'. All of
those ostensibly can provide the same functionality (SIP, Sip Termination) yet
no mention of why all three?

I mean, this _is_ their core businesses/functionality.

EDIT: I didn't mean for this to imply I think something sinister is going on,
or that I don't think Twilio is really cool! I'm just curious of why they went
with what I would consider an unorthodox technology stack (the combination,
not picking any one of the three).

I mean, wouldn't you guys think it was interesting if Github made a brief
mention of the fact that some user information was stored in Oracle, others in
MS SQL, and some in Postgres? _shrug_

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patrickgzill
My guess would be that they use different pieces of each software program.
Asterisk is good for some things but FreeSwitch can be used as a SBC (session
border controller) and from there, you can do load balancing across multiple
machines. etc. as an example.

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bradleyland
I think you pretty much nailed it. I know a few guys that run a VoIP carrier
out of Cleveland, OH. They started out building their core SIP switches on
Asterisk, but quickly learned that Asterisk isn't the best piece of software
for that role. They moved their core to OpenSIPS, but still use Asterisk for
feature offerings (like conference bridges and IVRs).

It's a 'horses for courses' thing.

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gt384u
For the sake of another data point, my own company provides a hosted PBX
platform and just recently acquired another hosted PBX platform provider.

We are a hodgepodge of J2EE pre-SIPServlet on JBoss using Rhino for the
scripting layer. Also, we acquired a company which essentially wrote their own
Asterisk for Tomcat and built the current incarnation of our PBX platform on
that. We do SBC with OpenSIPS and there are a number of other random bits and
pieces (including Asterisk) which have played a role over the years. I have
not seen the other company's codebase, but I am told they are a similar
hodgepodge of PHP, Erlang (but not for the telephony bits), and possibly Java.

I would rather enjoy and appreciate any consistency in the platform, but I
doubt we'll ever get to do the sort of rewrite that would provide that
consistency.

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knodi
Is boxconfig there custom made deployment tool?

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johns
Yes

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laluser
There are better alternatives out there. I think the company is a little too
over hyped, to be honest.

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nphase
Please open source boxconfig.

