Update: Please follow this post for the latest regarding the release of the Asterisk / Amazon EC2 How-to guide

I am excited to announce the upcoming availability of my new How-To guide on Asterisk and Cloud Computing. Created for Amazon’s EC2 platform (part of Amazon Web Services), it will teach anyone with an AWS account and server to setup their very own PBX “in the cloud” in one hour or less!

With this guide, open source telephony aficionados will be able to tinker with, deploy and manage a world-class telecom solution for their home or business. Setup extensions, voicemail, phone numbers and more! With Asterisk and Amazon EC2, there’s no limit to what you can achieve with a world-class computing and telephony platform.

This guide is based on months of evaluation and testing of Asterisk on Amazon EC2. All the kinks and showstoppers have all been addressed in this simple, easy-to-use guide. Don’t waste hours trying to figure all of this stuff out on your own! Get the guide as soon as its available!

Keep checking back for updates to learn of the guide’s availability.

More than three years ago, I began my experimentation with Asterisk and IP telephony on Linux. I had previously ditched my reliance on POTS (“Plain Old Telephone Service”) in favor of a new player in the VoIP space: Vonage.

Amazed and equally blown away by the feature set and possibilities of VoIP, I began to wonder how anyone could implement this technology for their own use. That’s when I discovered Asterisk.

Today, my implementations of Asterisk no longer reside on a physical server shoved in a closet somewhere. Instead, they now live “in the cloud” within Amazon’s vast IT enterprise environment in Seattle, Washington. I can remotely manage and administer my Asterisk installation from anywhere in the world, including the addition of extensions, troubleshooting the dial plan and much more.

To date, there’s been no downtime in almost 200 days of running Asterisk on Amazon’s EC2 platform. No downtime! What’s even better about implementing Asterisk in the cloud is that it’s painless and hassle free. Servers can be launched almost instantly — and in real-time — without unboxing and installing necessary hardware to “turn up” new installations for service expansion, etc.

As someone with a near 20 year history with technology, the combination of IP telephony with cloud computing is an amazing development in the telecom world. The possibilities are endless and only limited by one’s imagination. Welcome to a new world of telephony — Reinvented in the cloud.

If you’d like to experience Asterisk and IP telephony in the cloud for yourself, I’d be more than happy to welcome your SIP or IAX-based phone into my dial plan for a real-time conversation to test the quality and reliability of VoIP on Amazon EC2. For everyone else, please take advantage of my consulting offer for a 10% discount on Amazon AWS (EC2 and S3) services as mentioned on Amazon’s blog.

For a few months now, I’ve evaluated, tested and deployed various images (virtual servers) and applications on Amazon’s robust EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) platform. I not only host various websites on the service, but also databases, files and even Digium’s Asterisk PBX!

Two months ago, I installed the Asterisk PBX (I like to compile the code, rather than using packages) to one of my EC2 servers for testing. Everything worked flawlessly, except an annoying SIP over NAT issue which prevented the passing of audio between clients and the server. Now that I’ve corrected it, I recently transitioned my Asterisk configuration away form home to Amazon EC2.

The result? Success! I couldn’t be happier with the performance of my PBX on Amazon EC2 when compared to my Dell PowerEdge 2400 server at home. Now, I can add even more phone lines and features thanks to the increase in processing power and bandwidth.

This is telephony on steroids!

Learn more about the Amazon EC2 service and be sure to come back here to take advantage of my 10% discount on EC2 consulting services.