Re: [Kamailio-Users] [OpenSIPS-Users] [OT] about scalability, experiences, demands

Hello all, recently some statement came to my attention that "there is a common consent that the current design/architecture of [..] OpenSER (inherited from SER) is no longer able to deliver and to meet the present requirements and demands". I don't want to argue that much about this opinion, in fact the demands to a Voice over IP solution depends very much on the certain setup. But i want to share some details from my experiences in developing and operating a big VoIP infrastructure here at 1&1. We've about 2 million customers on our platform, that uses over 5 million individual numbers and terminate about 1 billion minutes per month. We're able to provide a good service with the actual architecture of OpenSER without any real problems. Of course there is always some room for improvements, but so far the main challenges we faced were not in the scalability or performance areas. More important issues are e.g. the inherent complexity of the SIP protocol and the maintainance of a good quality assurance and integration process. We started some years ago with OpenSER 0.9.5, which we then extended a lot in house. For example we implemented more than 25 own modules, a own path implementation, did a lot of bug fixing and workarounds for certain problems we've found. We're able to reduce this amount of proprietary code a lot in the past, because of progress in the OpenSER development, intregration of our "key" modules and a lot of other contributions. We're using now something between OpenSER 1.3 and Kamailio 1.4 with only a few private extensions. So in my opinion the actual design of our server is not "[..] an inevitable dead-end that needs to be avoided.". I rather think that we'll be able with continuing improvements to tackle the upcoming challenges well, especially as we will work together in the future with the SER developers in improving important areas of this software. But this is just my personal opinion, everybody is of course free to have their own position. With best regards, Henning Westerholt