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

[Eric Chamberlain]

On Feb 13, 2009, at 9:59 AM, 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.
>

The big advantage I like, is the ability to have identical production  
and development environments, without having to continuously run the  
development environment.

When writing up how to install DAHDI on an Asterisk EC2 instance, I  
went through several instances, I could bring up an instance in  
minutes, use it for 10 or 15 minutes and then throw it away.

I could do something similar with VMware ESX attached to a SAN, but it  
is much more capital intensive, even with leasing.

For a single box, EC2 probably isn't going to be cheaper.  But if you  
have a dynamic environment; need web, asterisk, and database servers;  
scaleable storage; and off-site backup, EC2 starts getting more cost  
effective.

Storing Asterisk realtime data in Amazon's SimpleDB and voicemail in  
S3, would make for a very interesting and scalable solution.

--
Eric Chamberlain, Founder
RF.com - http://RF.com/