Comments on: Part 2: Asterisk in a Cloud

By: Running Asterisk in the cloud with Amazon EC2 @ IONCANNON

Running Asterisk in the cloud with Amazon EC2 @ IONCANNON — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:39:58 +0000

[...] now on setting up Asterisk on EC2 and then this past week someone else came out with a post on how to install Asterisk from scratch on EC2. I figured I would wrap up what I have since I take the path of installing Asterisk on VirtualBox [...]

By: Eric Chamberlain

Eric Chamberlain — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:17:22 +0000

To learn how to use Amazon EC2 without having to build your own Asterisk server, read http://voxilla.com/2009/02/18/asterisk-on-the-cloud-with-a-click-1405.

By: Eric Chamberlain

Eric Chamberlain — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 02:00:17 +0000

The pre-built Asterisk AMI is up, ami-0bfa1d62. We’ll post a follow-up story with usage instructions.

By: Asterisk On The Clouds | CloudAve

Asterisk On The Clouds | CloudAve — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:23:22 +0000

[...] Even though it might take a while before we see such a service offered to customers, there are ways to start off with Telephony on the Clouds right away. From small businesses to enterprises, it is possible to tap into the power of Amazon Web Services and Asterisk to build anything from a simple PBX to a Call Center solution. It is possible to install and run Asterisk on Amazon EC2 seamlessly and take care of the communication needs of any business. Voxilla has a series of two articles explaining how to do it. VOIP in a Cloud Asterisk in a Cloud [...]

By: Asterisk en “la nube” | Mi Brain-Training Personal

Asterisk en “la nube” | Mi Brain-Training Personal — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:11:59 +0000

[...] Pues ahora le ha tocado el turno a Asterisk. Esto no es algo nuevo, ya que la virtualización de centralitas es algo que ya lleva tiempo dando vueltas, pero hasta ahora no había leído que nadie tuviera un Asterisk en Amazon EC2. Podéis echarle un vistazo al howto aquí: http://voxilla.com/2009/02/13/asterisk-amazon-ec2-1178 [...]

By: Eric Chamberlain

Eric Chamberlain — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:55:45 +0000

@John,

Excellent idea about the AMI. We’ll get one built and published under Voxilla.

By: John Todd

John Todd — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:15:13 +0000

Eric –
Would you be willing to make an AMI of your work available with a “stock” version of DAHDI and Asterisk on it, with GCC and maybe Asterisk 1.6.0.5 on it? The instructions here are _excellent_, but if you made an AMI that would save people the work of buidling all this stuff themselves, and give them an “out-of-the-box” Asterisk instance that would just work with MeetMe and a fairly capable version of Asterisk. I’d assume that it would be easy at that point for people to test and compile other versions of Asterisk, but getting them to the point where it “just works” with all the features would be great.

As for testing:

VQManager:
http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/vqmanager/

Wireshark (with SIP/RTP state monitoring)
http://www.wireshark.org/

ReQual:
http://admin.star2star.com/recqual/

I’d set up a few “canary in the coal mine” streams to some servers you control that are neither the test systems nor the primary load generators, and then loop a bunch of calls back and forth between your device-under-test (DUT) and a few other call generation instances of EC2. Monitor what you see on the few audio streams you have going to your local host for hints as to how the DUT is handling things. It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s darn close.

By: Nir Simionovich

Nir Simionovich — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:46:08 +0000

Hi Eric,

Loved your work, gives a very nice solution to the problem I had with DAHDI. I’m confident there is a simpler solution to the re-compiling GCC issue, taking hours to compile DAHDI doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

Maybe it would be a good practice to create a few publicly available AMI’s that are DAHDI friendly, and have people work with these?

Just and idea…

Nir Simionovich
http://www.simionovich.com

By: Eric Chamberlain

Eric Chamberlain — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:17:52 +0000

@Bryan,

All the STUN server implementations I have seen, require two public IP addresses. Since EC2 only provides one IP address I don’t think running a STUN server is possible, without some hacks.

We’ve been using public STUN servers from the list at http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-STUN.

@John,

We haven’t done any load testing with MeetMe, but we do have G.711 traffic coming through our servers without any problems.

Our measurements have all been qualitative, any quantitative measurement tools you could pass along would be great.

By: John Todd

John Todd — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:17:01 +0000

Eric – This looks great! I’m especially happy about the DAHDI work. Have you done any experiments under load (2, 3, 4, etc.) with MeetMe to see if it holds up? That’s been the most pressing issue with * on EC2 that I’ve seen, and if you’ve solved that with your recipe, it would be great! Also: have you done any load testing with actual G.711 channels through the system in hairpin or simple echo configurations? Let me know if you want some tools to measure various packet/jitter/throughput stats. The more people doing testing and publishing it, the better!