Asterisk IP PBX in Amazon's EC2 cloud

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 [1].