RestComm is an open source communications platform that provides many of the same capabilities as Twilio's services. It allows for building voice, messaging, and fax applications in a scalable and pluggable architecture. The presentation discussed RestComm's current features and roadmap, benefits of moving to an actor model and OSGi framework for future versions, and a call for community contributions to help improve documentation, testing, and other areas.

1. RestComm Cloud Communications
Presented By: Thomas Quintana
RestComm Project Lead
Director of Cloud Engineering @ TeleStax, Inc.

2. Don't Know What RestComm Is?
● A Web Abstraction Layer
● A Communications Platform

3. Some of the Benefits
● Easy to get started
● Scalable
● Pluggable Architecture
● Service Provider Agnostic
● Compatible with Twilio's restful APIs and
TwiML markup language

4. Some of the Difficulties
● The system has multiple pieces to configure
and manage
● May require a B2B UA or SBC to handle NAT
traversal
● Production deployments require knowledge of
communications network topologies

5. Architecture

6. Where are we Today?
● Support for most of Twilio's restful APIs
● Full TwiML support except the new additions
<Leave> and <Queue>
● Support for faxing and SIP user agents
● Very few changes are being accepted for the
1.x releases as we approach a final release
and internal APIs are stabilizing.

7. 1.0 Roadmap
● Continue Testing and Stabilizing
● Beta2 release first week of November.
● Implement the remaining restful APIs
● Implement Twilio's new TwiML elements
<Leave> and <Queue>
● CR1 release end of December
● Final release end of January

8. Room for Improvement
● Using the project but not reporting on the
mailing list
● Building applications in private
● Asking questions via direct email
● Few 3rd party contributions

9. We Need Help!
● Open discussions on the mailing list.
● 3rd Party Vendor Integration
● Documentation
● Web Site Enhancements
● Testing!!!

10. Lessons Learned
● RestComm is conceptually a pure message
passing system. Therefore, we will be moving
to an Actor model in the 2.x development tree.
● RestComm is built up of modules providing the
necessary functionality to the RCML
interpreter. Therefore, we will be moving to
OSGi as the module system for RestComm.

11. Benefits of moving to an Actor
Model
● Scales better than the current approach on a single server
● Simplified programming model
● No need to worry about synchronization
● Actors can be hot swapped with zero down time
● Actor supervisors enable actors to be restarted in case of failure
(ex. A connection to the media server fails due to server failure; a
different media server is selected to carry on the call and finally the
supervisor restarts the connection on the new media server)

12. Benefits of moving to OSGi
● Manages module dependencies for us
● Increase re-use of the individual components
in projects outside of RestComm
● Zero downtime updates of all but the
RestComm core

13. The Future!
● 100% Twilio compatibility
● 100% Tropo compatibility
● Adopt Akka Actor Model Framework
● Adopt Apache Felix embedded OGSi
container to manage RestComm's loadable
modules

14. Questions & Answers
Thank You!
Thomas Quintana
http://www.restcomm.org
thomas.quintana@telestax.com
@thomasquintana