Moving your Softswitch to the Cloud is easier and more important than ever
For many years, communications service providers (CSPs) have been installing, hosting, and operating VoIP Softswitches on bare metal servers. Even when Amazon AWS cloud got popular, yet many communication service providers could not benefit from what the cloud has to offer due to the nature of Voice Over IP (VoIP) traffic. Here is an example of the 7 best benefits that AWS Cloud provides its users that telcos not hosted on AWS are missing today.
From my experience, one of the obvious issues for soft switches and RTP software playing not so well with AWS Cloud out of the box is the Elastic IP Architecture. An Elastic IP address is a reserved public IP address that you can assign to any EC2 instance in a particular region until you choose to release it.
Still, with some hacking around you could get open source Softswitch components to work on AWS, yet it was still not that appealing or worth the effort since AWS has a higher cost than what CSPs are already paying for bare-metal and too risky for experimenting with large production traffic plus all the privacy and regulation concerns.
We did not see any real-world evidence that any serious operator is making the move to the cloud for their core components like a Softswitch.
In 2020-2021 as AWS cloud got a lot better and unicorns like Twilio has proven that AWS is a great choice for auto-scaling communications services and most importantly, it works! We see real evidence that some of the largest operators in the world taking the decision to move their core network components like voice, SMS to the cloud (AWS, Azure, Oracle, Google Cloud).
To me, this translates to that in a couple of years some of the world’s largest telecom operators will be closer to each other than ever, if my predictions are right, due to security, network quality, and other factors it makes sense that operators will make it a standard and give a preference to do business with CSPs hosted on the same cloud vs in traditional networks.
How to setup VoIP Softswitch on AWS cost-effectively?
If you agree that your business should be in AWS for any of the reasons mentioned in this blog or others, I think the below will help you get started with a reliable and secure setup that can scale as your business grows all within AWS without breaking the bank.
Recommendation
Recently it caught my attention that a 16-year-old Softswitch development company and Open Source contributor Sippy Software Inc announces after 7 years of work. Finally, Sippy Softswitch now runs on AWS and at price starting from $250/month and available in the following AWS Regions. Here is a quote from Sippy’s website regarding their AWS offering.
Sippy has been working on AWS for over 7 years now and we know AWS very well. We are happy to offer hosting on the cloud. Choose from almost any AWS region around the world. Our AWS hosting options allow you to make the most of the AWS cloud.
Sippy Software Inc.
Sippy is a full-blown class4/5 Softswitch that handles 90 billion voice minutes annually. It’s reliable, durable, and scalable, and built with proven and well-known open-source projects yet comes with 24×7 world-class support.
Sippy is also the inventor of RTP proxy project and the original developer of SIP B2BUA back in 2003.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, large operators are planning or in progress to moving their core infrastructure to the Cloud. Being in the same network or as close as possible to their signaling and media infrastructure will benefit your business in many ways. it is good to be ready and close to these operators benefit from this next big migration.
In this blog we have given one recommendation of a partner that is known and trusted to provide you fully featured class4-5 softswitch on AWS cloud , without fear to break the bank you can start as low as $250 for 100 channels and grow your business from there.
I hope you found this recommendation useful for your business future, if it does, please leave a comment as it will encourage us to provide write more content around this topic.