On 12/17/09 9:29 AM, David Hiers wrote:
I've been snooping around our production systems, and the base code version for everything that we run in the call path is between 2 and 3 years old. It is patched to a fare-thee-well, and the stuff runs quite well.
That's interesting to hear, because people look at me like I have three heads when I say our main production switching is still on Asterisk 1.2. I can't see upgrading production systems with any major revs (we have applied patches because of security/stability fixes). I haven't found a compelling business case for buying new servers just to load up the new version until recently. Right now we are migrating to Asterisk 1.6.2 because we want to move to database-driven rather then config files, as well as integrate fax and video phones within the same servers. We've been working with the 1.6x software for nearly a year on semi-production systems with the gracious help of some of our more beta-friendly customers. This week we've just started migrating some other customers to it, and hope to be in full production by year end.
How 'bout you guys? How long do you let a codebase steep before you're happy with running it in production?
Upgrading servers "because it's new" is never a good idea. I can't say I have a fixed schedule, but I look at cost:benefit:risk and make the decision based on that. Although 1.6.2 is very new, there's a huge amount of benefit in using it, and we've mitigated the risk by doing long-term pre-production testing. The cost of the upgrade will be the same now or later (all labor of course, we're using free Asterisk). A lot depends on the vendor, also. Asterisk has a long history of buggy releases, but in the last couple years Digium has made a very strong and effective effort to put quality ahead of everything else. I now feel confident that new releases from them are going to be very stable, and we get honest opinions from their development team on whether it's usable for our production environment. -- Carlos Alvarez TelEvolve 602-889-3003 Advanced phone services simplified