SIPSwitch on The Amazon Cloud

[Aaron]

Hi All,

I have been able to install and run the sipswitch on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. There was no problem placing calls and no big obstacles were encountered which is good news. More information about The Cloud can be found on the link below.

http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_l_2?ie=UTF8&node=201590011&no=3435361

Anyone wanting to test out the instance I have running can use:

Username: clouduser
Password: password
Server: 67.202.32.139

The dial plan sends all calls anonymously to Blue Face so the useful destinations are 300 and 303. I'll probably switch the instance off in a couple of days so if you can't connect that's probably why.

Being able to run the sipswitch on The Cloud is significant as we have always intended to host the sipswitch outside Blue Face's infrastructure and The Cloud is the most flexible and scalable hosting environment around. For anyone considering running their own version of the sipswitch or just wanting to play around the cost of using The Cloud is USD0.10 per hour (thats right it's billed by the hour). There are also some bandwidth costs associated but they will be tiny if you're only using SIP traffic and are likely to be less than USD0.01 per month! Apart from being cheap the other great thing about The Cloud is it's on demand so you can turn on and off your server as needed. To run it for a month will cost USD75 but for the hobbyist playing around for a few hours here and there it would literally be a couple of dollars a month! And because I know spg will ask you do get a public static IP address BUT it's NAT'ted. It's a straight through NAT though, i.e. a single private address maps to a single public address and there is no port translation, so with a bit of tweaking it can be used just fine with the sipsiwtch and even Asterisk.

Now the gotcha. It's targeted at developers so it's not that user friendly. There are some good FireFox plugins that make it a matter of a few clicks to get an instance up and running but there is still a bit of set up and information to absorb. If you can master The Cloud you definitely go up a couple of notches on the Tech Wizard scale.

The next stage for the sipswitch and The Cloud is to create a public image so that anyone interested can run their own instance without having to go through the install (which isn't that difficult but does require a bit of Linux know how).

Regards,

Aaron

[Aaron]

I've now created a public Amazon Image that has the sipswitch installed. The id is:

ami-cd23c6a4

After starting the instance the configuration files need to be set in:

/usr/local/sipswitch

To execute the sipswitch:

/opt/mono-1.2.6/bin/mono sipswitchconsole-linux.exe

The process is very crude and ideally I'll get around to doing more work on the image to automate some of the steps above.

For Betamax users there is the added appeal of this approach giving your server a different IP address every time the instance starts meaning the FUP problems encountered on the main sipswitch service should not be an issue.

Regards,

Aaron

[Aaron]

Although it serves no real purpose I've tested that I can dial *1*1*1303 from my phone and have my call routed as:

Cisco 7960 -> sipswitch (10.0.0.100) -> sipswitch (EC2 Cloud) -> sipswitch (www.mysipswitch.com) -> call to 303 blueface.

[325xi]

I was thinking to play with this http://serveraxis.com/vds.php
Is there any reason why Amazon Cloud would be a better choice?

[Aaron]

Running a server in the Amazon cloud is more expensive than your standard hosting provider so for an individual instance that you're planning on running for a while there is no benefit to the Cloud. If you only want to experiment for an hour here or there the Cloud may work out cheaper since it's billed by the hour rather than the month.

Where it does start to become powerful is where you need to scale an application, in this case the sipswitch, across mutliple servers for fault tolerance, loa d balancing or both. For example with the Cloud it would be possible to dynamically start up extra instances of the sipswitch during peak times to handle extra load and then when things quiten down turn them off again. Not that multiple instances are required for the sipswitch at the moment and it was more for interest that we tested out running it on the Cloud.

Regards,

Aaron