Greetings All,

Time certainly flies and it seems like AstriDevCon and AstriCon 2019 were a century ago. It’s hard to imagine that in fact they were only a month and a half ago! Since everyone has had some time to recharge I thought now was a great time to review and talk about what was discussed.

For those who are not familiar with AstriDevCon, it is an opportunity for Asterisk C-level developers, Asterisk ARI/AMI/AGI developers, and Asterisk integrators to get together to learn about what has happened in the last year with the Asterisk project and to discuss ways to improve it going forward. It is typically held on the “pre-conference” day of Astricon.

There is not a lot of fixed structure prior to the meeting. Matt Fredrickson in his role as the Asterisk Project Lead, usually talks about the state of the project and summarize what’s happened in the last year and then we plan our agenda for the remainder of the day. Items of interest that come up range from project policy related questions and requests, development related questions, and discussions of how things have gone the previous year from a technical integration perspective.

This year we had five presentations covering various topics. I talked about PJSIP, what it provides and the timeframe on when we can consider removing the chan_sip module. I also gave a more user focused version of this talk during AstriCon itself and you can view it on YouTube. Next up we had Sean McCord talking about the various ways over time that external media has been done with Asterisk and his own project, AudioSockets, which provides functionality. His change is currently up for review on Gerrit and should be included in the future. George Joseph presented next about the defined mechanism in ARI that has been added to allow an easy mechanism for enabling external media through ARI. This included a demonstration doing live transcription of the conference. Pascal Michaud presented next with another take on external media by using WebSockets instead and also showed transcription using this mechanism. Lastly Sylvain Boily talked about connecting Asterisk to AMQP by allowing AMI and ARI to publish to it and consume from it.

After lunch was adhoc discussions about topics that were brought up. ARI was a focus, specifically the single connection oriented nature of it. Many individuals thought that allowing multiple connections for the same ARI application would improve things substantially for deployments, along with the ability to establish an outgoing connection for it instead. External media was also brought up with discussion around adding additional transports and encapsulations to the defined ARI mechanism, as well as extending it so it could be done from the dialplan and not just ARI. STIR/SHAKEN, which is a new emerging technology to provide assurance over callerid, was also brought up as something to watch and look at integrating into Asterisk. If you’re an ITSP or provider this is certainly something you need to watch and be cognizant of.

If you’d like to see a more complete agenda notes were taken during AstriDevCon and they are available on the wiki.

I hope this provides some insight into AstriDevCon and I urge you if you’re a developer and attending AstriCon in the future to also attend AstriDevCon and help make Asterisk even better by participating!