[asterisk-users] Asterisk on EC2 cloud computing - price assumptions - your brain needed

[John Todd]

On Feb 13, 2009, at 11:05 AM, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 09:59:50AM -0800, John Todd wrote:
>>
>> I've been involved with getting better data for running Asterisk on
>> the Amazon EC2 cloud computing system.  Here are some calculations
>> I've made on costs based on current published prices on Amazon's
>> system.  Feel free to tell me that I'm wrong with these  
>> calculations -
>> but be specific if you find any problems, as I suspect others may  
>> glom
>> onto these figures as gospel and I'd hate to have the wrong data in
>> there.
>>
>>   http://www.loligo.com/asterisk/misc/amazon-ec2.xls
>>
>> The net of my calculations is that a small instance of 20 users in a
>> standard office environment would cost about $75 per month, which  
>> when
>> compared to running a server in-house works out to be (raw cost, not
>> including admin time and not discounting out-of-office bandwidth)  
>> only
>> $38.56 more.  Very interesting.
>
> For 20$ or slightly more you can rent a Xen or OpenVZ virtual host  
> which
> will probably do as well.


For the average Xen VM host, what's the price for bandwidth, assuming  
G.711 channels at the rates I quoted?  I don't have a list of  
bandwidth costs here for other hosting providers.   Of course, Amazon  
is simply the most well-known "cloud" system at the moment but you can  
fill in the slots in the spreadsheet with whatever data might be  
applicable.  Amazon also has a decent IP network peering structure  
from what I've seen, so paths into their network are typically short  
and direct.  How packets move around inside their network is still up  
to experimentation - waiting on someone to test jitter, packet loss  
(<cough>RONALD-AND-NIR<cough>) and other criteria.

The wildcard in the calculation (which is not examined) is having  
enough bandwidth out of your office to handle X simultaneous calls,  
and how much that costs.

JT

---
John Todd                       email:jtodd at digium.com
Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director
445 Jan Davis Drive NW -  Huntsville AL 35806  -   USA
direct: +1-256-428-6083         http://www.digium.com/