Slashing Latency: How Uber’s Cloud Proxy Transformed India’s User Experience

Click here if you don’t have a paid Medium account.

In the fast-paced world of globally scaled technology, every millisecond counts. I joined Uber in April of 2015, and if I’m being truly honest, I’m not sure if this story happened at the end of 2015 or in 2016. It all sort of blurs together when you’re working at a startup like Uber. For the sake of this story, I’m going to say that it’s late 2015. We were already a global company and were constantly under the immense pressure of scale.

One day, while working in the office at 555 Market Street in downtown San Francisco, I overheard a conversation that piqued my interest. If I’m being honest, it sort of pissed me off. A team was discussing the high latency issues faced by our users in India. The latency was so severe that it took over 900 milliseconds to initialize the first fetch, stacking on each other and making the experience miserable. In hindsight, anger may have been a telling state of my emotional headspace at the time, but that’s for another story. But I was angry for our users in India. I was angry they had to wait SECONDS just for the page to load. Adding to that, most of India at the time was on the 3G networking and on remote or rural connectivity, and their experiences would have made my mind numb.

Think about that. When most of us load an app that takes longer than 250 ms to initially fetch data, you’ll usually do 1 of two things.