I worked for a client in the streaming music space. They were going through the technical testing phase of partnering with a high end audio manufacturer. One

I worked for a client in the streaming music space. They were going through the technical testing phase of partnering with a high end audio manufacturer. One of their requirements was to retrieve the metadata of N songs within a fixed time limit, simulating their customer playing our streaming audio on their hardware. The testing office was in LA. The audio and metadata was in Ireland. The lag across the public internet consistently failed their tests. So I deployed a small read-only copy of the API in an LA data centre which tunnelled inside the cloud provider back to Ireland. I used DNS geo tools to ensure the tester transparently hit the local LA data centre. We passed their tests with ease and landed a 6-figure contract. The hardware customers probably had a terrible experience though...