VNF Asterisk

In this repository you'll end up finding a mish-mash of information around a project that @dougbtv and @leifmadsen are working on. For this project, we intend to build out an Asterisk-based VNF (virtual network function).

This VNF will not be intended to be deployed to production, but rather provide a set of reference material and examples of how you might go about building one. You can think of this as more of a demo or research project.

More information to follow as work progresses.

Presentation material

@dougbtv and @leifmadsen did a presentation of this material in a workshop at AstriCon 2017. The slides are available here:

• Part 1: http://tinyurl.com/vnf-asterisk-1
• Part 2: http://tinyurl.com/vnf-asterisk-2
• Part 3: http://tinyurl.com/vnf-asterisk-3
• Part 4: http://tinyurl.com/vnf-asterisk-4

Topology

Basic topology

Initially we'll start out with a very basic topology which will have nothing to do with any VNF work. We'll simply use this to gather up some data and basic configuration of Asterisk and SIPp to validate we can pass data through Asterisk and reflect it back.

Adding a controller

We'll then move into the first phase of development where our Asterisk machines will be instantiated and configured via a controller. We'll make use of the Asterisk REST Interface (ARI) and sorcery in order to push all configuration information to Asterisk with very little pre-configuration.

Creating containers

After we've got our basic topology created and controller built and working, we'll start the process of moving to a container based infrastructure.

Building a VNF

In the next phase we'll migrate things to Kubernetes and start making things look a lot more like a true VNF. Components will be broken into specific components and deployed via pods, and different networking interfaces will be added based on what components need to communicate among each other.

Running in Kubernetes

Take a gander at the ./k8s folder to find an Ansible playbook which will (primarily) template the YAML resource definitions (pod specs, etc) for vnf-asterisk in Kubernetes. Later on, we'll template these with Helm.

Want some help running them? We'll add more detailed documents here as time goes on, but for now I recommend checking out dougbtv's blog article on the topic.