As we continue to grow and have thousands of accounts under our belt we are doing our best to tackle issues in a more scalable way whenever possible.In this post we are tackle system time. The challenge in managing system time across multiple data centers, regions, and time zones is that if a system time becomes "out of wack" then the phone system begins to route calls incorrectly if routing is based on time of day. Example, if my business hours are 9am-5am and outside of those hours I provide the caller a different greeting with different options that switching of behavior doesn't occur when it should.
We originally went about handling this by building scripts that were installed on each system which were designed to force time checking and syncing on a daily basis faster than most operating systems are designed to do so. This approach however is an "islanded" direction as there was no way to manage this after the fact other than manually usually once something had been reported as an issue.
Thanks to our development team and centralization efforts (which will become more apparent as we announce functionality over time) we have built a new way to handle this specific issue.
We now have a new back end system in place and subsequent operating system service that forces accounts to call back to our central portal and get a list of available NTP servers in each region.
The service will then check each ntp server provided by the central portal one by one until it successfully reaches a server and performs a successful sync which will force the operating system to live on the correct time and subsequent time zone.
By doing this then phone system then will feed off of the correct time and route accordingly. Our team will now plan to go back to existing deployments and update those with the new service as explained above. We will also adjust our new deployment templates to include this service moving forward.
While a small issue in the big scope, we hope BVoIP partners value a look ahead approach and centralization story.
Stay tuned to our blog for other enhancements we will bring to the table in the near feature.
