asterisk users - Feb 2009 - Asterisk on EC2 cloud computing - price assumptions - your brain needed

I've been involved with getting better data for running Asterisk on  
the Amazon EC2 cloud computing system.  Here are some calculations  
I've made on costs based on current published prices on Amazon's  
system.  Feel free to tell me that I'm wrong with these calculations -  
but be specific if you find any problems, as I suspect others may glom  
onto these figures as gospel and I'd hate to have the wrong data in  
there.

   http://www.loligo.com/asterisk/misc/amazon-ec2.xls

The net of my calculations is that a small instance of 20 users in a  
standard office environment would cost about $75 per month, which when  
compared to running a server in-house works out to be (raw cost, not  
including admin time and not discounting out-of-office bandwidth) only  
$38.56 more.  Very interesting.

JT

---
John Todd                       email:jtodd at digium.com
Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director
445 Jan Davis Drive NW -  Huntsville AL 35806  -   USA
direct: +1-256-428-6083         http://www.digium.com/

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 09:59:50AM -0800, John Todd
wrote:
> 
> I've been involved with getting better data for running Asterisk on  
> the Amazon EC2 cloud computing system.  Here are some calculations  
> I've made on costs based on current published prices on Amazon's  
> system.  Feel free to tell me that I'm wrong with these calculations -
> but be specific if you find any problems, as I suspect others may glom  
> onto these figures as gospel and I'd hate to have the wrong data in  
> there.
> 
>    http://www.loligo.com/asterisk/misc/amazon-ec2.xls
> 
> The net of my calculations is that a small instance of 20 users in a  
> standard office environment would cost about $75 per month, which when  
> compared to running a server in-house works out to be (raw cost, not  
> including admin time and not discounting out-of-office bandwidth) only  
> $38.56 more.  Very interesting.
For 20$ or slightly more you can rent a Xen or OpenVZ virtual host which
will probably do as well.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
icq#16849755              jabber:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
+972-50-7952406           mailto:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
http://www.xorcom.com  iax:guest at local.xorcom.com/tzafrir

On Feb 13, 2009, at 9:59 AM, John Todd wrote:
>
> I've been involved with getting better data for running Asterisk on
> the Amazon EC2 cloud computing system.  Here are some calculations
> I've made on costs based on current published prices on Amazon's
> system.  Feel free to tell me that I'm wrong with these calculations -
> but be specific if you find any problems, as I suspect others may glom
> onto these figures as gospel and I'd hate to have the wrong data in
> there.
>
>   http://www.loligo.com/asterisk/misc/amazon-ec2.xls
>
> The net of my calculations is that a small instance of 20 users in a
> standard office environment would cost about $75 per month, which when
> compared to running a server in-house works out to be (raw cost, not
> including admin time and not discounting out-of-office bandwidth) only
> $38.56 more.  Very interesting.
>
The big advantage I like, is the ability to have identical production  
and development environments, without having to continuously run the  
development environment.

When writing up how to install DAHDI on an Asterisk EC2 instance, I  
went through several instances, I could bring up an instance in  
minutes, use it for 10 or 15 minutes and then throw it away.

I could do something similar with VMware ESX attached to a SAN, but it  
is much more capital intensive, even with leasing.

For a single box, EC2 probably isn't going to be cheaper.  But if you  
have a dynamic environment; need web, asterisk, and database servers;  
scaleable storage; and off-site backup, EC2 starts getting more cost  
effective.

Storing Asterisk realtime data in Amazon's SimpleDB and voicemail in  
S3, would make for a very interesting and scalable solution.

--
Eric Chamberlain, Founder
RF.com - http://RF.com/