Christoph Eicke
IP Authentication: A Tale of Performance Pitfalls and Challenges in Prod
#1about 1 minute
The case against IP-based authentication for microservices
Migrating a PHP monolith to microservices revealed the fundamental problems with using IP-based authentication, a method you should avoid.
#2about 6 minutes
Understanding the mechanics and tradeoffs of IP authentication
IP authentication simplifies user access for large institutions by mapping an IP address to a user, but it creates issues with user tracking, licensing, and technical complexity.
#3about 3 minutes
Investigating initial deployment failures and performance issues
The first two production deployments failed due to massive error spikes, leading to an architectural change from a slow MySQL database lookup to a faster Redis cache.
#4about 2 minutes
Adopting a fail forward strategy to debug in production
After repeated failures, the team decided to stop rolling back and instead collaborated directly with customers in screen-sharing sessions to diagnose the issue live.
#5about 2 minutes
Discovering the root cause of the infinite redirect loop
The core problem was that legacy and new AWS accounts read the user's IP from different headers, causing a mismatch that sent cookieless bots into an infinite redirect loop.
#6about 2 minutes
How proxies and data entry errors break assumptions
The investigation revealed that academic and corporate proxies often rewrite URLs and strip cookies, and a simple data entry error in the CRM granted access to 1.5% of the internet.
#7about 1 minute
Lessons in collaborative problem-solving and architecture evolution
Using mob programming sessions during the crisis strengthened the team, and the final architecture evolved from Lambda to Fargate for cost and performance reasons.
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