Update: November 2021
This article is out of date; there are no longer WebPageTest Server AMIs, so you need to install WPT on a base OS. The updated article is here WebPageTest Private Instance: 2021 Edition
If you have any interest in website performance optimisation, then you have undoubtedly heard of WebPageTest. Being able to test your websites from all over the world, on every major browser, on different operating systems, and even on physical mobile devices, is the greatest ever addition to a web performance engineer’s toolbox.
The sheer scale of WebPageTest, with test agents literally global (even in China!), of course means that queues for the popular locations can get quite long – not great when you’re in the middle of a performance debug session and need answers FAST!
Also since these test agents query your website from the public internet they won’t be able to hit internal systems – for example pre-production or QA, or even just a corporate intranet that isn’t accessible outside of a certain network.
In this article I’ll show you how to set up your very own private instance of WebPageTest in Amazon AWS with autoscaling test agents to keep costs down