Digium, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Asterisk open source PBX project, announced the release Asterisk 14 this week, continuing to evolve the decade-old effort and making it easier to use and deploy.
Asterisk first had a stable release back in 2004 with the debut of Asterisk 1.0, and a lot has changed over the course of the dozen years since then. The last major release of Asterisk prior to this week was in October 2014, with the debut of Asterisk 13.
While Asterisk 13 was a Long Term Support (LTS) release that Digium has pledged to support until 2019, Asterisk 14 is a standard release and will be supported only for two years before hitting its end of life.
“As a Standard release, improvements made in Asterisk 14 have focused both on extending and enhancing existing functionality, as well as making long-term investments in major new features,” the release notes for Asterisk 14 state.
Among the new features in Asterisk 14 is the ability for media to be retrieved on-demand from remote web services. Asterisk 14 has also made a number of incremental improvements that are designed to help administrators deploy the PBX across a distributed infrastructure.
Asterisk 14 also includes new DNS capabilities enabling a system to be deploying using IPv6 AAAA records.
“For administrators using Asterisk in large, horizontally scalable service-based ecosystems, the additions and improvements made in version 14 are significant,” Matt Fredrickson, project lead for Asterisk with Digium, said in a statement. “Asterisk’s enhanced media capabilities make it easier to build flexible media services and to decrease maintenance and deployment burdens.”
He added, “Asterisk 14 also resolves one of the greatest initial barriers to being productive – learning how to install it.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eSecurityPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
