WebPagetest on EC2

[andrewa]

I just wanted to throw out my thanks to everyone contributing -- it's amazing how straightforward it already is to get servers up and running. I'm running a combination of servers on Amazon EC2 and Rackspace CloudServer to get some better regional representation (though still working on having some ability to determine which data center the Rackspace instance comes up in).

I wanted to add an insight that may apply to some users that depend on distributed CDNs. One caveat I've encountered with Amazon is that the DNS servers used end up making requests that appear to served out of Seattle. The CDN I use has POPs (Points of Presence) in most major cities, but when using the Amazon US East nodes, they still end up using CNAMEs pointing at the CDN POPs located in Seattle rather than on the east coast. The Rackspace servers I run correctly resolve our CNAMEs to point at POPs near to the data center as I would expect.

The workaround that I'm using is to manually override the DNS settings on the EC2 instance, and have the first DNS server point at a public DNS (such as OpenDNS) and the second pointing at the originally assigned DNS (just in case there's a need for it)

-andrew