But they were bleeding money, and just sold $30M total last year. Lots of people use Asterisk (it's basically everywhere - whatever you call - dentist, doctor, plumber... - they have the default Asterisk music-on-hold), but not all of them put a coin in the box. :)

They're everywhere because they're already there, but doesn't mean new boxes are being installed.

Personally I wouldn't use it; I'd just write some quick code with Twilio (using Twilio functions or a companion app running on Heroku for the business logic) and let them handle it. Less maintenance overhead.

This is old battle.... Centrex VS PBX . ( if you are old enough to remember Centrex). Twillio is next-gen Centrex.

I'm not really old enough to have experienced Centrex, but for small businesses its promises makes sense from a business point of view. Less maintenance/support overhead is a huge plus.

sounds good. until you run conferencing services or whatever. Then the pricing is pretty simple: buying wholesale SIP and operating on your own is substantially cheaper.

irl maintenance is pretty straightforward. I do it as a side thing to my main job.

Somewhat off-topic, but what wholesale SIP provider would you recommend? Looking for something small-scale for now, pay as you go as opposed to $X,000/month.

Twilio, voip.ms, or DIDlogic. Twilio may be for large users, but it works great for tiny ones as well. No minimums, simple wholesale pricing, and they still have free support even if you don't want to spend thousands a month for 24/7/365 phone support with an expert.

voip dot ms has been good to me for many years now

We are wholesale SIP provider. email in info. contact me offline.

I've been using flowroute for years now.

Nexmo is quite good.

How can I contact you?

On the other hand, I'm not sure Asterisk has a future.

It's quite a legacy application and is not easily scalable nor made highly available.

The world is also moving to hosted communications (Twilio, etc) so there is less and less need for a local PBX, thus less demand for Asterisk.

You can scale Asterisk up quite a bit (we have customers with clusters of 50+ boxes) and every telecom uses it some way or the other.

How do you share state between them?

The state you tend to store is in the application side, so it still backs onto things like SQL databases in the end. You'd put another service in front of your Asterisk instances like OpenSIPS or Kamailio to distribute load.

Seems like a huge hack. What we really need is some kind of etcd for telecoms, where you just configure it and they replicate and share state automatically.

It's not a hack. Think of Asterisk as if it was an http server + backend code. How do you scale?

You scale horizontally using proxies (kamailio dispatchers), (what you would call "reverse proxies in the http world), and use external storage / database / logic.

SIP? This sounds like exactly what SIP does. Or at least a function of what it exposes

Asterisk is just another daemon. You could use etcd for it or Puppet or whatever to create config on the fly. On FreePBX you generally use MySQL/MariaDB.

Lots of ways. Usually externally, through a database. An Asterisk box processes and forwards calls - you can hook into a "master controller" that decides what is to be done.

> The world is also moving to hosted communications (Twilio, etc) so there is less and less need for a local PBX, thus less demand for Asterisk.

Correct, but don't forget many hosted communications services use asterisk internally.

Twilio did use Asterisk in the past, although I believe they have switched to something else.

I believe they built their own, exactly for the reasons I outlined above.

And they also have a very decent line or hardware. Digium cards used to be the de-facto standard to build quickly a small PBX system, and I really appreciated their quality.