For months, I’ve been sitting on a few interesting domains that I purchased on a whim in the event I might do something with them. Today, I am pleased to announce the upcoming unveiling of CloudCrunch. You may have seen the name around the Internet or here on my blog, but today, I want to officially raise awareness of it and let folks know that it’s happening.

Cloud computing is an exciting development in technology. It harkens back to the day of ‘time sharing’ with mainframes, but the difference here is that one has complete and full control over their virtual server. I’ve been a strong proponent of Amazon’s EC2 platform, which I believe is the ‘best-of-the-best’ for this emerging space.

It is my intent to build CloudCrunch to become one of the Top 10 cloud computing resources on the Internet. The centerpiece of the site will be a blog, followed by resources including forums, howto guides and more. The first howto guide to launch with the site will center around the installation of Digium’s Asterisk PBX on Amazon EC2. There’s been a lot of interest in this guide and I believe it will become a hit once CloudCrunch launches.

When I’m satisfied with the initial build of CloudCrunch, I’ll announce a soft launch to get the wheels turning. Special thanks to the many people who’ve expressed interest in my cloud computing projects here on ronaldlewis.com.

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.

To help accelerate my Amazon EC2 consulting goals (at least 10 clients per month to start), I am considering a referral program which will pay $50-$100 per paying referral. This is a great and easy way for someone to make extra money referring potential clients to my services.

If you’re not aware of Amazon EC2, there’s a lot of information available here. In a nutshell, it’s a phenomenal, mass utility computing platform which utilizes Amazon’s multi-billion dollar IT infrastructure to power web applications and more.

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.