Amazon EC2: Self-Hosting for VoIP Systems

Cloud computing is not a new topic, by any means. While the technology is still growing in popularity, cloud computing has led to an exciting and revolutionary means of hosting for the Voice Over IP and telephony markets. We’ve discussed “cloud telephony” several times on Considering Convergence, but now that the foundational elements of the technology are tried and tested, it’s ready for prime time. Last week, I had an excellent chat with John Todd, the Asterisk Open Source Community Director at Digium. Prior to the discussion, I was following some of the exciting stories and examples about running Asterisk-based environments on Amazon’s EC2 cloud. After the discussion, and through some of my own personal experimentation with the environment, I can honestly predict that self-hosting by way of Asterisk on the Amazon EC2 has, and will change the landscape, for large businesses and especially service provider markets. The “Asterisk In The Cloud” model has been in the making for some time now, and through the work of several key individuals, Asterisk instances can now be deployed as easily as clicking a few buttons in the Amazon EC2 interface. Personally, I was able to get several “production-ready” instances up within an hour… from signing up for EC2 through making the first call. Time is money, and simplicity is priceless. Through our discussion, John predicts that this type of “self-hosting” will make big waves in the VoIP service provider markets. With Amazon’s pre-built infrastructure, ease-of-scalability, and incredibly simple deployment methods, John predicts that a growing number of hosted VoIP providers are utilizing services like EC2 already. It’s as easy as spawning a new instance of a pre-built Asterisk deployment to scale up to serve more users. When has it ever been that easy to deal with scale? To help estimate potential ROI and cost-recovery scenarios, you may want to experiment with John Todd’s Asterisk on EC2 Cost Calculator Excel Worksheet. For more of the technical details, and some interesting how-to articles, please check out Eric Chamberlain’s series, “VoIP in a Cloud” at Voxilla. Thanks again to John Todd at Digium for contributing to this post.