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Asterisk IP PBX in Amazon's EC2 cloud
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If you want to know how cloud computing and IP telephony could work together, Voxilla has posted a two-part tutorial on how to load Digium Asterisk IP PBX onto Amazon's EC2 cloud service.
Cloud computing allows businesses to have a highly-scalable (up and down) alternative to a hosted service and a traditional flat-rate/per month contract. An account can be setup and configured within a few hours - no waiting for hardware to arrive on the doorstep - and as demand increases, more processing resources can be added as needed within minutes. Businesses pay for what they use, without a minimum monthly fee.
Written by Eric Chamberlain, the Voxilla tutorial goes through a step-by-step process on how to sign up for Amazon Web Services and configure the service, installing Asterisk 1.6, and creating storage volumes for holding the Asterisk configuration, voicemail and logs. The process is straight-forward and well documented, including tips to optimize CPU usage to lower Amazon charges.
Readers should also take care to review the comments posted at the end of the piece. Digium's John Todd notes that the economics for virtual hosting appear to be roughly double what one might pay for a dedicated leased in-house server.
For more:
- Voxilla tells how to put VoIP in the cloud. Post.
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Comments
Posted by John Todd | February 16, 2009 - 4:47pm
Doug -
Yes, the prices are roughly double (I didn't include bandwidth from an office environment, since I figure that's a wash given that most office VoIP systems will be using SIP trunking and that office-to-office calls will have media contained on the LAN.)
However, there are some additional costs that may make up for that other ~$35 of costs: backups are handled by Amazon, there is no cooling cost (not calculated in my equations), there are no hardware failure concerns (at least at the platform level,) and there is great disaster recovery capability.
As with all things, it depends upon what your firm values the most. EC2 is a slightly different flavor of virtualization than what most VM providers offer, which might work better or worse depending on your circumstances. Asterisk administrators that are expecting infrequent but high loads would be wise to look at EC2 and architect their solution accordingly. If you're just designing a run-of-the-mill PBX for a small or medium business, then there are other VM solutions which may make more sense, and locally-installed systems often make the most sense of all.
Posted by Nir Simionovich [www.simionoich.com] | February 17, 2009 - 2:16pm
Hi Doug,
Apart from Eric's concise EC2 implementation guide, I've post information about the various economics and trials I've performed with EC2.
Cheers,
Nir Simionovich
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