I would like to run Openfire (or another XMPP server) on EC2. At the moment this is just for testing, so easy setup and configuration are important, as is low cost. At some point, however, if things go well, it will be important to scale this. Ideally, it would be nice to not have to switch software when the scaling happens, but if a switch needs to happen later it certainly can.

My requirements are:

1. basic XMPP services, including muc and pubsub.
2. Logins controlled from an external API. Preferably, when a user attempts to connect, the XMPP server checks with the api to see if their username and password are correct, but I can also have the API keep the XMPP server up to date on new users, deleted users, pasword changes and so on. I see Openfire has a "user service" API. Not ideal, but it looks workable.
3. Jingle, including relay and STUN. It's not at all clear to me if the Jingle Nodes plugin takes care of this.

I'm a bit confused about what's required to set this up, and I'd rather know in advance than be confused along the way :). eg It seems like STUN servers require more than one IP address. Can Openfire do all this for me, including stun and media relay on a single machine?

Is this hard to configure on EC2 with Openfire? What are the basic steps? Would this be easier with something else like, say Tigase?

What about database? Should I use amazon's database service, or run a db on the same machine?

Would the server be compatible with a service like http://www.siteuptime.com/

Thanks!