The Results
When one of New York’s most prestigious agencies calls, you answer. Big Spaceship came to us looking for a development partner, and we were excited before we even knew the details. The project: a custom application for Samsung Mobile, one of the biggest names in tech. Over a few very busy weeks, we worked shoulder-to-shoulder with YouTube engineers and Big Spaceship creatives to build and host an application serving a live video feed and content stream for the Samsung Unpacked event.
“Unicorn impressed YouTube’s most senior engineers. You blew us away with your elegant solution to a complex problem!”
Technology
Millions of concurrent visitors is never an easy problem. This application raised the stakes on several fronts:
- An efficient and compact Angular application
- Embedded on YouTube through a legacy API
- A responsive front-end across devices
- Scalable to handle millions of requests per second
- Horizontal scale without delay
The Challenge
Samsung had burned through three agencies before finding us. Each took the same approach to Galaxy Unpacked’s scale — load balancing, containerized micro-services — and each fell short. Millions of requests per second will do that, even when money is no object. The audit screenshot tells the story.
The Solution
The API was the bottleneck, so we thought outside the box on the back-end. Our answer was simple and powerful: a Rails CMS that cached the API as static JSON files and distributed them across CloudFront’s CDN. Scale was only half the battle. The Angular application had to stay lean while carrying serious responsibility:
- Supporting mobile and desktop DOM events within an iframe
- Caching and reconciling the API on the client side
- Frequently fetching data without over-burdening the server