Amazing idea. Building a truly robust and reliable webhooks ‘service’ is harder than it seems. We just finished rebuilding ours and I looked for a service like this before starting but couldn’t find any.
Sure, maybe some tech companies will prefer to do an in-house thing, but I can definitely see the value.
Our POV from when we built ours, if it helps: delivery must be reliable, we need visibility on every delivery attempt (status code, response body and headers), some control in retry logic, must be able to add headers (in our case we add a signature), must be replayable if needed, every attempt must have a unique ID, and must be able to send callbacks as a webhook back to our API.
Good luck and congrats for being accepted at YC.
It (most likely) works like this: the device request the context directly to the edge server (several strategies available to accomplish this: you can ask a master server for the content who issues a redirect to the edge server, Apple could use a single name server and route via DNS, they could use a single name and IP and route via BGP, etc). The edge server, which is the terminating end in the TLS protocol, is aware of the content being requested. Now the edge server can determine if that content is available or not locally and server it back to the user or request it from the origin server first and then back to the user.
Every time I read an article like this I end up baffled. I don’t live in the US (or Europe) and even in this part of the world I know that my health is taken care of. I might get a higher bill by choosing a private clinic to get a single room or a hotel-like experience, but if I choose to I can pay zero for a broken arm or even heart surgery. If the ambulance is closer to a private facility, then there’s where I am taking to, I’m not paying extra for that.
I also wouldn’t forget to mention GraphQL. Once you get a hang of it, it’s just beautiful to use. Hard to go back. If you use Sequelize with node you can hook it up in a morning.
Licensing content it’s their biggest cost so yes, that’s their (probably correct) strategy. But instead of ‘crappy’ I believe the right terms is ‘long tail’. Make something for everyone since relative producing costs are minimal vs buying that content and distribution costs are almost zero for low-viewing content.
I think this shows the poor state of Apple’s QA. Theorically there should be a list of predefined tests with a binary output, to pass the test or not. Before deploying anything, tests must be run and passed.
It seems the procedure is very human-dependant.
Our POV from when we built ours, if it helps: delivery must be reliable, we need visibility on every delivery attempt (status code, response body and headers), some control in retry logic, must be able to add headers (in our case we add a signature), must be replayable if needed, every attempt must have a unique ID, and must be able to send callbacks as a webhook back to our API. Good luck and congrats for being accepted at YC.