Asterisk on Amazon EC2 cloud; Google Voice update

Some quick updates on interesting topics featured on this blog.

A blog reader recently introduced me to Amazon’s Free Tier offering of their cloud infrastructure service. The gist: get a free year of a virtual server, within the limits of 10GB storage, 613MB RAM, and low CPU usage with some “bursting” as needed. That’s good enough for a test box, certainly.
I have been running Asterisk and FreePBX on the Rackspace Cloud since October 2010. It works great there, and if it weren’t for Amazon offering something for free, I would say that RS Cloud is still the better deal. (You can see the numbers for yourself if you calculate the price of Rackspace’s lowest-configuration cloud server and compare with Amazon’s. At only 256MB, the Rackspace server is a bit slim on memory, but more than adequate for development and testing and even running a few calls at a time in production.) But I’m into saving pennies and decided to move my test system to Amazon’s cloud, at least for the twelve months they’ll let me use it for free.
In short, it works according to my previous instructions for installing Asterisk and FreePBX on the Rackspace Cloud Server. Hackers who have set it up on RS Cloud can do the same on EC2 by selecting an instance within the Free Tier; use the Amazon Linux 64-bit image with 8GB disk. Use Elastic IP to give yourself a consistent (but not “static,” really) IP address. And note that your server is actually behind Amazon’s NAT, so you’ll need to configure SIP NAT settings as if you were behind a home router. Tip: use 10.0.0.0/8 for the localnet. Lastly, the firewall is configured on Amazon’s EC2 console, not in iptables. Enjoy!
Google Voice update
An unofficial, unsupported, much discussed Google Voice module for FreePBX made the rounds recently. In fact, the original author commented here on this blog advertising his module, but apparently no longer maintains it. I recommend sticking to the manual-configuration method documented here (hit the link just referenced and scroll all the way up). Unfortunately, Google Voice integration with Asterisk is still pretty flaky. Outbound calls will work perfectly, but inbound calls are hit-and-miss. I have seen this in my testing and so have others. (Note: don’t cross Michigan Telephone! Hi, MT!) Get a DID to forward to, use FreeSWITCH or an OBi ATA box for better success.

2 thoughts on “Asterisk on Amazon EC2 cloud; Google Voice update”

  1. No one should use Google Voice connected to Asterisk or FreeSWITCH for business purposes. It’s not business-class. It’s experimental-class. As for Amazon, it’s a wise choice for testing, because I want to pay as little as possible to test something out. It’s free for a year, so I’ll take that and test my VoIP experiments on it. I am not recommending it for production use.

  2. Know exactly what you mean about Google Voice – not the best, is it?

    Interesting that you feel that Amazon’s offering, because it’s free, is a wise choice. Obviously we are all trying to cut corners, and it’s hard to balance “If it ain’t broke” with “Move on”, but being wary of corporates as I am I may be slightly biased.

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