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.