Reply To: Backup PBX in cloud/AWS

Yes. No problem!

Many call centers are keeping their primary PBX’s on site (for performance and other reasons), and using the cloud for their backup PBX’s. HAAst will run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) + Amazon Elastic Cloud 2 (EC2), Microsoft Azure, and more, to create your primary PBX, backup PBX, or both. You can even place the HAAst operational database in Amazon Relational Data Services (RDS) or equivalent with both peers writing performance and operating data to the shared database. (The HAAst web GUI allows you to view combined and individual PBX reports in many areas). We do not recommend placing Asterisk configuration databases in RDS or equivalent – but this should not be a problem as they are fairly static and small.

Unlike other open source and closed source commercial HA products, HAAst does not use any LAN based protocols (NFS/DRBD/hearbeat/etc). HAAst is designed around only WAN based protocols, primarily it’s own PeerLink protocol. HAAst can accommodate large swings in network latency as would be seen in links between in-house servers and the cloud. HAAst (Commercial Unlimited edition) even learns these variations and adapts to the changes, so you never have a false positive fail-over of the cluster. This approach allows customers to even place their PBX instances in different Amazon Recovery Zone’s, and in different Regions.

With AWS, or any cloud provider, you will want to use their static network hardware option; Amazon calls it Elastic Network Interfaces (ENI). As of August 2016 Azure (ARM and ASM) support static network hardware (MAC address).