AstriCon 2017

Asterisk, and its user base, stands poised to be a powerful force in the oncoming rush of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies that are sweeping the telecom industry at large. There isn't an Asterisk user or contributor worth their salt that's afraid of replacing a proprietary hardware solution with a virtualized open-source solution based on Asterisk. We know it can be done, and have been doing it for years. The sustainability of open source solutions are an invisible hand moving the telecom industry forward at a lightning pace. Our community, the Asterisk community, is ahead of the curve. We already know how Asterisk can be used to fill a variety of telephony solutions; from PBX, to IVR, to tandem switch and beyond. Armed with the right tools and knowledge -- our community can become leaders in telephony Virtual Network Functions. Leif Madsen and Doug Smith of the NFV Partner Engineering Team at Red Hat, Inc. have been collaborating on a VNF (virtual network function) based on Asterisk to dually explore telephony VNFs (for examples, SBCs) and also in use in a continuous integration environment to validate infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments. The project, VNF-Asterisk is capable of being deployed in a variety of situations -- from manual deploys, to Ansible-managed virtual machines on OpenStack, to running in containers on Kubernetes and OpenShift. Doug and Leif are coming to Astricon to hold a hands on day-of-learning to get into the details of VNF-Asterisk. This session is to review a workshop held during the devcon, and explain why the Asterisk community is in a unique position to lead the charge in telephony for NFV. The workshop is held to arm our community with the tools to create carrier-grade Asterisk-based NFV solutions using open source cloud-native platforms such as OpenStack and OpenShift (Kubernetes).in