[comprev]

I have a story of a hack from my time in the streaming audio industry.

I worked for a company who opened up their API to audio hardware manufacturers to allow integration with our streaming service. One particular company had a rigorous test: Query 20 songs via our API (one song per query - random songs selected so caching playlists would not work), retrieve and parse the metadata to display info on their hardware within 23 seconds.

The test had to use the same public API endpoint as our own customers (via our music app).

Their test lab was in Los Angeles. Our data and API endpoint was in Dublin. Using the public internet they managed to load 13 songs at most. I was tasked with reducing the latency.

To pass the test I deployed a temporary read-only copy of the app in a data centre in LA and used Route53's geolocation routing functionality to route the testers requests transparently to the local app. The DNS was live for 24hrs.

We passed the tests despite not reflecting any real world conditions and the hardware company promoted integration with our platform for years afterwards.