[aisofteng]

Years ago my team was tasked with greenfield dev of a cloud native app while the platform/infrastructure was also evolving. We worked nights and weekends to get it done on time only to find out at the last second that the platform team had enforced controls on internal services being able to access the internet, requiring authentication to do so. This was news to us.

We were behind schedule and had, I think, three separately implemented/maintained/deployed services that needed to be able to access the internet to do their work. Rather than implementing the intended auth mechanism in each service, writing tests for it, going through code review, and redeploying, I instead added nginx to the base Docker image they all used, configured them to send requests to that nginx instead of as normal, and made that nginx instance man-in-the-middle our own services to attach a hardcoded HTTP header with the right creds.

I man-in-the-middled my own services as a hack - dumb but it worked. It was meant as a quick hack but stayed for I think a couple years. It did end up being eventually being the source of an outage that took a week to diagnose, but that's a different story.