Better suport for High Availability and Load Balancing for VoIP with PowerDNS

Today was a very productive day. For those who don't know, I have coded a DNS plugin that works with PowerDNS that allows FusionPBX (and FreeSWITCH of course) to run in load balanced mode. This will allow in a PBX network to have many servers across the globe and your customers will connect to them depending on some network metrics. I should say that this approach doesn't need any SIP proxy servers in front of VoIP the servers (many people use Kamailio for this). The magic happens in the VoIP servers. They know where to bridge the call and all the logic happens within the FreeSWITCH, which it is very cool if you ask me.

The big difference about my software against others is that the network decision is based on the actual network metrics (traceroutes, pings) and not just a geolocalization like most part of load balancing services such as Amazon WS DNS service.

The new release I am working on is the 1.2.3. Among the bug fixing I have been doing,  it has NAPTR record support. Some IP phones such as Polycom needs NAPTR records in order to know what SRV records it should use.

Another cool capability that was requested from a customer of mine is the ability to do server groups. Grouping is very useful, for example, all servers in the same datacenter should belong to the same group. With this, all metrics shouldn't be done as metric for server A would be almost the same for server B if they are in the same location. This was though to get around of data centers that have blocked the traffic, such as Azure where you can not do traceroutes or pings.

If you want to read more about this plugin, you can visit the official PowerDNS Add-on page for High Availability and Load Balancing page.

Good luck!