Distributed systems, Browser automation2024
Distributed Asset Automation System
A one-click internal service that retrieves large licensed assets from a no-API, anti-bot platform — backed by a self-healing fleet of browser agents.
$1.8k/mo
in manual labor saved
10×
faster than manual retrieval
Zero
downtime, self-healing
The starting problem
A team needed on-demand access to large licensed digital assets (videos up to several GB) on a third-party platform that exposes no public API and ships aggressive anti-bot protection. Manual downloads were slow, didn't scale across the team, and broke whenever the platform shifted its front-end.
The system in pictures
Screenshots of the system at work, step by step: what your customer sees, and what your team receives.
- 1.
The request
An internal form: paste the link, one click.
- 2.
The orchestration
n8n drives a fleet of browser agents with health checks and automatic failover.
- 3.
The delivered file
The asset's signed URL is captured and the file is downloaded automatically.
How it works
What we built
- 1
An n8n orchestration layer receives requests from an internal form via webhook and issues a short-lived, single-use token per request.
- 2
A fleet of headless Python agents (FastAPI + Playwright) runs the authenticated browser session on residential IPs, each exposed through its own Cloudflare Tunnel.
- 3
The system captures the platform's short-lived signed CDN URL at click-time (~45s validity) and streams the file straight from the CDN to the requester — the orchestrator never proxies the heavy payload.
- 4
Ordered multi-agent failover: a health-checked rotation tries each agent until one succeeds, so a single offline machine never breaks the pipeline.
- 5
Hardened against expiring URLs, per-item rate limits, and an SPA navigation quirk that broke page evaluation on certain asset types.
Highlights
- Reduced a manual, error-prone task to a single internal click.
- Resilient by design: health checks, ordered failover, single-use tokens, explicit error notifications.
- Handles every asset type automatically — archives, stock video with resolution selection, and photos.
Tools used
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