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Jack Morris
Jack Morris

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⚙️ UCaaS Scaling: The Part Nobody Warns You About

A lot of teams jump into scaling their UCaaS platforms thinking it’s just about adding more servers or increasing concurrency limits.
But in reality, the biggest challenges usually aren’t about capacity — they’re about the invisible dependencies that start falling apart as usage grows.

Some patterns I keep noticing:

  • A minor change in SIP routing suddenly affects call setup time
  • Media servers hit limits long before signaling does
  • CRM or billing integrations start timing out under load
  • A single misconfigured container causes a cascading failure
  • Monitoring isn’t granular enough to spot issues before users do

Most UCaaS outages during scaling happen due to tight coupling in the architecture.

A few strategies that tend to prevent major headaches:

  • Split signaling and media layers early
  • Keep integrations version-safe instead of hard-linked
  • Use observability (Homer, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry) before scaling
  • Introduce changes gradually with feature flags
  • Containerize services before traffic spikes hit

These small steps often make scaling smoother, especially for platforms that weren’t originally designed for high-volume or multi-tenant usage.

If you’re exploring UCaaS scaling challenges or modernizing an existing setup, this breakdown explains the problem from a practical angle — I found this useful while researching

Curious to hear from others:
What’s the most unexpected issue you’ve faced while scaling UCaaS or VoIP infrastructure?

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