Our Company is looking to start testing the Amazon EC2 servers as a possible solution for our hosted/cloud clients.
Just had a few quick questions.
I know there is an AMI already built with asterisk 1.8 and freePBX 2.10, but from what I understand this one was built from a basic linux AMI and it different from the distro provided by freePBX.
With 2.11 release there will be some features that require the distro in order to use. I am assuming that these features will not be useable on AMI currently out there?
Has anyone used the EC2 service to host a freepbx distro system?
How did you like the performance of the system?
Did you have to tweak the distro any in order for it to work?
Some clarity, The FreePBX Distro Is an ISO of FreePBX and Asterisk maintained by Schmooze Comm. If you change it in any way you can no longer refer to it as the “FreePBX Distro” a trademark of Schmooze.
I also suggest that Amazon EC2, that has no SLA for availability or latency is the last place I would develop a product around.
If you are interested in a reseller platform with a meaningful SLA on a certified virtualization platform with a fully integrated CRM contact Schmooze and check out PBXtended…
While I happen to be riding in the same vehicle as the Schmooze com team headed to Astricon to .promote the FreePBX project on my own time, I am not employed nor receive compensation for these endorsements. My company is a customer of Schmooze and a very satisfied reseller of PBXtended.
I can’t comment on the reliability of Amazon’s EC2 servers yet but I have been playing around with them for a week or two now (just for the fun of it) and all good so far
I wrote a blog post explaining the process of installing the Distro on a local virtual machine and how to then convert it into an EC2 instance. This way you don’t have to use the AMI you mentioned - you can rather build your own one from the latest Distro
Unbelievably, skyking actually contributes a worthwhile point for a change and didn’t run off into one of his paranoid security rants. LATENCY!
You will find that Asterisk in the cloud doesn’t work very well because of highly variable latency/jitter which the cloud isn’t very good at compared to good old fashioned traditional single server.
It may work ok some of the time but not consistently so it probably won’t stand up to long term use. That is assuming the cloud you are on is relatively busy which may are these days.
With all due respect, playing around is not testing. If you have a system that has at lease one or two channels in use all day you will find that you miss around 1% of your speech. The cloud makes it’s money by oversubscribing the platform. It just simply isn’t designed for real time applications.
Honestly, I wouldn’t host my “corporate” voice in the cloud for one main reason - what happens if the internet in the office goes down? That’s where a local server with a POTS backup is better.
Nonetheless, I have been “playing” with a cloud hosted solution. I have been using this for home use (didn’t mention that earlier) between family in different parts of the world. Working really great for that
Rapidblue, thinking in terms of a single Internet connection is a somewhat narrow view.
My company is a provider of Enterprise Hosted VoIP for over 6 years. We have moved from MGCP to SIP and several platforms. In the beginning we only offered it to our managed service customers with T1 or better connections to our data center. At that point our Cloud was not virtualized, it was clustered on an ATCA HA Blade Solution, a telco grade platform capable of delivering 5 9’s of reliability.
Today our customer networks are hybrid, at the low end dual ISP’s with a VPN solution and automatic failover routing to dedicated fiber with T1 or Internet/VPN backup connections.
The constant is the high reliability and survivability that a high quality hosted provider with multiple data Tier 3 data centers brings to the equation.
Hosted VoIP is a viable solution for firms from 2 extensions to 2000.
