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.
Related jobs
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.
Matching moments
57:36 MIN
Managing the live migration and resolving production issues
Migrating half a million users to a new payment service provider
20:40 MIN
Identifying the limitations of the initial Cloud Foundry platform
Back(end) to the Future: Embracing the continuous Evolution of Infrastructure and Code
41:16 MIN
Answering audience questions on authorization best practices
Un-complicate authorization maintenance
32:43 MIN
Reflecting on early design choices and the problem with DNS
Opening Keynote by Sir Tim Berners-Lee
37:26 MIN
Q&A on Replay.io architecture, adoption, and CI/CD
Fighting test flakiness with time machines
00:48 MIN
A personal story of breaking production at scale
I broke the production
24:47 MIN
Understanding critical architectural trade-offs and anti-patterns
Azure-Well Architected Framework - designing mission critical workloads in practice
00:21 MIN
The challenge of a high-traffic monolithic system
How to Destroy a Monolith?
Featured Partners
Related Videos
Accelerating Authentication Architecture: Taking Passwordless to the Next Level
Yedidya Schwartz
Scaling: from 0 to 20 million users
Josip Stuhli
Single Server, Global Reach: Running a Worldwide Marketplace on Bare Metal in a Cloud-Dominated World
Jens Happe
Going Beyond Passwords: The Future of User Authentication
Gift Egwuenu
Answering the Million Dollar Question: Why did I Break Production?
Luís Ventura
Unveiling the Dark Side: Navigating the Pitfalls of Digital Ambitions
Johannes Hansen
Reliable scalability: How Amazon.com scales on AWS
Florian Mair
Our GitOps approach for deploying an Identity Provider and an API Gateway in a SaaS company
Axel Barbier
Related Articles
View all articles



From learning to earning
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

Lead Backend Engineer (m/f/d)
Peter Park System GmbH
München, Germany
Senior
Python
Docker
Node.js
JavaScript

Solution Architect - Identity Security
amiconsult GmbH

IAM engineer
Keystone Solutions






IT Security Architect - IAM
Rocken AG