As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously wrote, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”. While it doesn’t take a Sherlock to uncover my cloud-native SBC secret to high availability, the same logic certainly applies.
As an independent consultant and Unified Communications architect, I am often challenged to analyze a variety of technologies to deliver an enterprise scale solution fit for production. Technical scoping considerations are vendor agnostic by definition. I typically avoid endorsing one particular product over another – especially since advantages vary from one deployment to another. But when no other viable alternative exists, the truth is easy to call out. I became a fan of AudioCodes’ Mediant SBC Cloud Edition precisely because it is quite literally the only game in town.
As outlined in the detailed Mediant CE technical installation overview posted on my blog, this is the only Microsoft Azure-native Session Border Controller that supports High Availability for voice along with carrier grade throughput for high call volumes. The micro service architecture is designed to optimize OPEX cost efficiencies by enabling elastic autoscaling of compute resources.
The high-level design emerged as a direct consequence of the requirement to deploy a Microsoft Azure stack supporting thousands of calls with carrier-grade quality. The Mediant Cloud Edition (CE) Session Border Controller (SBC) delivered on cloud-native autoscaling, significantly reducing low utilization with immediate impact on efficiency and cost management. The native Microsoft Azure deployment delivered impressive capacity, with as many as 40,000 concurrent media streams.
Fortunately, AudioCodes is widely recognized for high performance enterprise scale communications networks. The company’s solid reputation and ability to back it up meant the team’s innovative cloud-native deployment was approved for lab testing in record time.
As more UC networks migrate to a cloud-native architecture, support for autoscaling is emerging as a critical differentiator. Until I fail to eliminate a viable alternative, I whole-heartedly recommend AudioCodes SBC Mediant Cloud Edition (and I encourage everyone to share my “secret”).
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About the Author
Guest post by Shawn Harry, Cloud UCC Consultant Architect
Based in the UK, Shawn Harry is a certified UC Architect with over 20 years’ experience in Microsoft technologies with a primary focus on the Azure, Office 365, Unified Communications & Collaboration. Most recently, Shawn has focused on enterprise-scale cloud-native transformation from ideation to production ready delivery.
