Poormans cloudfront with EC2 and varnish

Recently (10-20 minutes ago), amazon couldfront (a cdn) stopped sending dns replies in europe:

% dig -t ns cloudfront.net

; <<>> DiG 9.4.3-P1 <<>> -t ns cloudfront.net
;; global options:  printcmd
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

I was going to do a guide to set up a varnish to replace cloudfront temporarily (and did actually set up the instance, and software – I might do the guide and ami anyway) when I realized, that I (as well as most other people) can just change the relevant url to point to the S3 bucket. Problem solved. That will, however, not be as fast as either cloudfront itself, or a varnish cached backend.

Should anyone be interested in how varnish is setup to handle failures from cloudfront, I’ll happily do an ami.