This is Mickaël Rémond presentation from ejabberd San Francisco Bay Area Meetup in march 2015. He presents latest achievements and progress made on ejabberd during the last few months. He then share his vision about the next steps to bring ejabberd XMPP platform to the next level.

1. A vision for ejabberd
March 2015, 25th
ejabberd San Francisco Meetup
Mickaël Rémond <mremond@process-one.net>

2. Who am I ?
Mickaël Rémond, ProcessOne Founder
ejabberd tech lead, XMPP expert
Focus on mobile networking and Internet of Things
Boxcar tech lead, push and alert s expert
Erlang developer since 1998
Author of French Erlang book
Erlang User of the year in 2004
Polyglot programmer, fluent in many programming languages (Elixir,
Objective C, Ruby)

3. XMPP and ejabberd

4. XMPP
XMPP stands for eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol
This is a standard of IETF
This is a decentralized / federated protocol
It is extremely versatile and widely used
Created for Instant Messaging
Expanded to group chat / social networks
Was extended to support voice calls
Managed to adapt to the smartphone era
Widely use in gaming and social network
Used to power the Internet of Things

5. ejabberd
Actively developed since 2002
Most widely deployed XMPP server
First server claiming XMPP protocol compliance.
Renowed for massive scalability, robustness, high versatility.
Deployed on the largest scale XMPP deployments on the planet.
Very extensible through event-based API.
Largest XMPP features set available, with good compliance and protocol
coverage (Pubsub, MUC, privacy, MAM)
Developed by a growing team of 60 developers.
1500+ stars, 500+ forks.
Consistently top Erlang project among with Cowboy and Riak.
Faced the challenge of managing the turning point of web and mobile.

6. Interesting XMPP extensions and features
Multi User Chat
PubSub and Personal eventing protocol
Message archiving Management
Privacy List
Service Discovery
Media proxies: Socks 5, Turn,
Voice support: Jingle and SIP
External components: Jabber component protocol, Priviledged entities
Reliability: Message Delivery Receipt, Stream Management
Several extensions around the Internet of Things (Provisioning, discovery,..)
and more to be announced in april :)

7. ejabberd architecture

8. ejabberd internal architecture
…
…
ejabberd node
router
session manager
c2s
Data Modules
one or several backends
Features Modules
Reliability & Security Modules
s2s
(federation)
Parsing-Sockets-Clustering
Authentication
- Mnesia
- SQL (MySQL, Postgres)
- NoSQL (Riak)
- LDAP
- PAM
- Rest API
Contacts - Rosters
- Mnesia
- SQL (MySQL, Postgres)
- NoSQL (Riak)
- LDAP
- Rest API
Message archive
- Mnesia
- SQL (MySQL,
Postgres)
Profile - VCards
- Mnesia
- SQL (MySQL, Postgres)
- LDAP
Carbon copy
Message acks
Stream management
Ping
Multi-User Chat
Pubsub
Offline
Personal events
Last activity
…
Message traceability
Anonymous access
Logging
Media transfer
Privacy
Shaping / anti DOS
Audit

9. Mobile - Desktop - Web Browser
XMPP - 5222
HTTP - 80
HTTPS - 443
SQL
ejabberd Instant Messaging
ejabberd cluster
...
Load balancers
XMPP - 5222
Database Instant Messaging
MySQL - Postgres
NoSQL storage
Riak
...
Riak
Protocol
LDAP - Active Directory
LDAP
Webservices
ejabberd data access layer
select one or several backends
ReST
ejabberd Instant Messaging
other ejabberd cluster
...XMPP
5269
Your company
infrastructure
Typical large scale ejabberd deployment
XMPP
5269
Optionalfederation
Rest of the XMPP
domains in the world
...

10. ejabberd changes

11. New features added to ejabberd: Mobile and
web
Mobile support:
Carbon Copy (XEP-0280)
Stream management
XEP-0352: Client State Indication
Web:
Websocket

12. New features added to ejabberd: Voice and
Media transfer
SIP proxy/registrar to integrate with IP phones (RFC-3261)
TURN Media relay: Traversal Using Relays around NAT (RFC-5766)

13. New features added to ejabberd: Scalability,
robustness, flexibility
Customizable session manager backends: Mnesia, SQL, Redis
New backend support with Riak
Improvement to mod_offline and new options.
Large test suite, supporting backends Mnesia, MySQL, Postgres, LDAP,
Riak

14. New features added to ejabberd: Security
TLS cypher configuration
Password encryption, SCRAM based
mod_fail2ban to ban IPs that show malicious signs
Elixir support
Package manager for contributions and custom modules
Easy cluster configuration
Configuration reload on live server

15. New features added to ejabberd: Developers
Elixir support
Initiated documentation revamp

16. New features added to ejabberd:
Administration
Package manager for contributions and custom modules
Easy cluster configuration
Configuration reload on live server

17. Coming in next releases
Message archiving support (MAM v0.3), with multiple backends support
(Mnesia, SQL, Riak)
Revamped HTTP Bosh engine.
Build in metrics / monitoring.
Revamped web interface.

18. A vision for ejabberd

19. What’s next ?
ejabberd is:
A testbed for XMPP extensions / a driver for innovation.

20. Testbed for new XMPP extensions
Where do you go when you are the de facto choice for server deployment ?
ejabberd is acting as reference implementation for XMPP extension. We want
ejabberd to drive the standard experimentation process of new extensions
by living on the edge:
This is what will make the XMPP protocol progress faster
This is what will drive the third wave / iteration of the protocol:
ie. Multi User chat Version 2
Support rework of mobile reliability stack and push notification (Think
ejabberd meet Boxcar skills)

21. What’s next ?
ejabberd is:
A testbed for XMPP extensions / a driver for innovation.
An initiative to lead the scalability understanding effort and see the
whole picture in XMPP systems.
A confluence between XMPP protocol and well crafted API

22. Lead the XMPP scalability effort
Scalable component is only part of the vision
“Is your engine fast ?”
It depends on the use case
You need to think the system as a whole / system level.
Clients behaviour is part of the system
Backend is part of the system
Operating system and network is part of the system
Best way to build scalable service is to have a strong cooperation between
client and server developers.

23. We created a measure for rating client
behaviour
We are launching an effort to rate the client behaviour from the server
standpoint.
We have a measure unit, the “jabs”
a measure do decide how efficient a client is. The more jabs it consume per
active user, the less “efficient” that client is.
This implies:
Business model for our ejabberd SaaS platform. We can offer cheap prices as
we are extremely confident of our scalability.
To motivate client developers to do the right thing, we price the platform on jabs
consumed per month.
This is build upon real life feedback of platform behaviours using our ejabberd
SaaS platform. We can improve the model for usage pattern from many
different use cases.

24. What’s next ?
ejabberd is:
A testbed for XMPP extensions / a driver for innovation.
An initiative to lead the scalability understanding effort and see the whole
picture in XMPP systems.
A confluence between XMPP protocol and well crafted API

25. XMPP protocol meet APIs - 1
XMPP is a standard. This is a well defined and interoperable protocol.
Mandatory to build long lasting platform.
XMPP is there since 15 years
It will be there in 15 years.
It is the best thing widely available.
Standard protocol is not enough and developers need API:
ejabberd SaaS is a great way to change the way XMPP server are
deployed:
avoid customization. 1 protocol, 1 code base, 1 feature set = no lock in
offer API to developers for integration. ReST based API.

26. XMPP protocol meet APIs - 2
API is not only about integration. It is about using ejabberd as a platform,
an application server.
We launched three initiatives:
Revamp of the internal ejabberd API to make them consistent and more
extensive
Ramp up testing, validation and benchmarking
Documentation effort

27. Documentation
docs.ejabberd.im
Admin guides and explanation on all available modules
Architecture guide
Development guide
Collaborative effort
Tutorials
Screencasts
Video channel

28. ejabberd vision
Everything is tied together.
Our roadmap is what accelerates making ejabberd:
a platform
an ecosystem

29. The future ?
ejabberd is already an ubiquitous component for messaging in:
Chat
Social network
Gaming
Internet of Things
Alerting / Notifications
Voice / signaling / Web RTC

30. The future ?
ejabberd is becoming the center piece of:
a platform
an ecosystem
for large scale federated realtime messaging.

31. Questions ?