This is a really great point. So far our strategy for this has been to build containers that mock various AWS services locally. This approach is still a bit experimental but please feel free to check out these repos:
We picked Rack because we like the conceptual analogy. The naming conflict is unfortunate but there are a limited set of good words available. We hope that context will make the meaning clear.
I've noticed this as well. It seems like the docker.local hostname can sometimes take a long time to resolve. If I resolve that hostname and visit the IP directly it generally works great.
Definitely check out the beta forums as most of the issues I've found have already been reported with workarounds.
If you're using ECS to manage your clusters on AWS take a look at Convox. We're building an open source platform that makes building, versioning, and deploying code to AWS via ECS incredibly easy.
https://convox.com
Disclosure: I'm one of the cofounders