Often when someone wants to test a site that isn’t yet ready for public release, they will use various security measures to keep the general public from looking at it. Sometimes they will use BASIC authentication and other times they will use firewall rules to only allow certain IP addresses access to the site.

However, as we continue to see a growing trend of BrowserMob customers who are deploying websites in the Amazon cloud using EC2, we wanted to highlight that the firewall technique does not work using our service.

The reason is that BrowserMob also runs in the Amazon cloud and as such is able to access the customer website across it’s private network. Because of this, the incoming IP address is not one of the ones we have documented, but a random internal-only IP that we do not know about ahead of time.

Fortunately, there is an easy solution: set up your EC2 network security to allow our Amazon “user ID” direct access through the port your website is hosted on. Simply authorize the User ID 581518868128 in the appropriate EC2 Security Group.

For example, If you are using Elasticfox, go to the Security tab and add a new permission for the appropriate Security Group. It should look like this:

Once done, you should be able to run your load test just fine. We do recommend running a small scale test first to confirm it works before running the larger test. If it’s not working, every request will result in a timeout.

We hope that helps, and we look forward to continuing to work with more companies making the transition to the cloud!

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EC2 · Security