Seán C McCord has been building clustered and distributed Linux systems commercially since kernel version 1.3. In 2004, he founded CyCore Systems to build complex, multi-realm systems built on open platforms for all manner of business. He has been building telephone-oriented software systems since the early 90s, and he has been building VoIP systems with Asterisk since 2003. He leapt into the container world as soon as he saw it, and he believe Kubernetes is the operating environment of the future.
It’s time to bring devops to VoIP. While less straight-forward than the average webapp deployment, we have much to gain from modern tooling. Kubernetes, in particular, is an important part of any scalable VoIP deployment.
None of the usual VoIP components lends itself well to operating in a containerized environment. The configuration is tedious and complicated. IP addresses are critical. NAT is brutal. But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost.
With a distillation of configuration dynamics, a bit of good architecture, and a generous amount of glue, we can establish a scalable, redundant, and reliable VoIP system leveraging all that is good from Kubernetes and modern container-based architecture.