A Free Virtual PBX?
OK, this is a completely radical idea spawned from this great series of posts on the Voxilla site about their implementation of Asterisk in the cloud running on Amazon's Elastic Compute CLoud (EC2). The only problem of any kind with this great solution is that Amazon wants its money - EC2 is completely pay to play on Amazon's (admittedly great and very robust and scalable) infrastructure.
It occurred to me that by now there really ought to be some open source versions of cloud software out there and that someone could then replicate Voxilla's detailed instructions on that platform (tailored to the new cloud software of course) to build a completely open source and maybe even free virtual PBX running out there somewhere on the internet.
It turns out that there is - sort of. I read about Eucalyptus - an open-source cloud computing infrastructure that duplicates the functionality of Amazon's EC2, even using Amazon's command-line interface. The sytem does require Rocks 5 - a clustering solution for Linux boxes. The Eucalyptus team is working on extending the solution and making it easier. But for now it should be possible for anyone running a set of Linux servers to set up and install a cloud computing infrastructure running Asterisk and offering virtual open-source PBX to the world.
Just not quite there yet with the free part though...
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