I used to watch telecom customers struggle with changing their Netflix subscription plans. They'd call customer service. Wait on hold. Talk to agents who would manually process their requests. Or they'd be limited to using only the telecom's platforms for changes. What a colossal waste of everyone's time!
So when my boss dumped this integration project on my desk—yeah, the one letting customers upgrade or downgrade Netflix subscriptions directly through Netflix's interface—I knew we had a chance to fix something broken. Four months and countless firewall permission requests later, we built something that actually works. Here's the messy story of how we pulled it off.
Let's be honest about what we're really fixing here. Manual processes aren't just inefficient—they're straight-up defects masquerading as normal business operations.
The Netflix subscription management process was riddled with these business logic bugs:
That last one kills me. We had actual humans—with college degrees!—manually processing subscription changes that could've been handled by 20 lines of code.
Picture this. You've just activated your Netflix subscription through your telecom provider. Before our implementation? Changing your plan meant either:
A fragmented experience. Clunky. Annoying.
Now? You change your plan right in Netflix. Done. The billing updates automatically on your telecom bill. Magic!—except it's not magic. It's just good architecture.
But this seamless experience? Behind the curtain lurks a byzantine web of systems spanning multiple companies. The kind of integration that makes developers wake up in cold sweats.
Let me walk you through the workflow. Don't worry—I won't bombard you with UML diagrams.
When a customer wants to change their plan:
Netflix UI → Netflix Backend → Adapter Application → Our Application
So Netflix calls this adapter application that sits between our worlds. The adapter tries to figure out which customer we're dealing with and sends us the request with customer ID and what plan they want.
Raw requests need serious validation:
Request → Customer Validation → Eligibility Check → CRM Order Creation
Our app validates everything—customer validity, request legitimacy, eligibility for the plan. This part was tricky as hell, but we got it working.
After validation, we create an order in the internal CRM. But not just any order—we have to deactivate the old subscription and activate the new one. This whole dance has to happen perfectly or customers get very unhappy very quickly.
Once the CRM does its thing, we need to know about it:
CRM Events → Event Processing → Status Updates → Callback Chain
And here's where it gets weird—for fixed and mobile customers, we had to listen to completely different Kafka topics. Why? Corporate reasons. Don't ask.
When we get the status, we tell the adapter app, which tells Netflix. Simple on paper. Maddening in practice.
The business logic itself? Not rocket science. But coordinating all these moving parts across different companies and systems? That's where the real headaches live.
You'd think that in the enterprise integration world, all the clean code principles go out the window. They don't—they matter more than ever.
Each piece does ONE thing:
// BAD: Service doing everything including your taxes AdapterService → [Routes, Validates, Processes, Orders] // GOOD: Nice clean separation AdapterService → ValidationService → ProcessingService → OrderService
I've seen too many integration projects become unmaintainable monstrosities because someone thought it would be "simpler" to jam everything into one service. It's never simpler. Never.
Things break. Constantly. Especially in distributed systems. Our approach:
This saved my sanity multiple times when things inevitably exploded in production.
You know what's worse than a broken integration? A vulnerable one.
Ironically, the toughest challenges had almost nothing to do with the actual business logic.
Organizational Complexity: Working for the subsidiary implementing the new app while coordinating with the parent company owning other key components. Corporate fun times.
Network Configuration: The firewall permission requests—my god, the firewall permission requests. Easily our biggest time sink. If I never fill out another firewall request form, it'll be too soon.
Security Implementation: Mutual TLS took forever to get right. Not because it's technically difficult, but because getting the right people to sign off on the right things was like herding caffeinated cats.
API Key Management: Every system had its own incompatible approach. Because of course they did.
Event Handling: Managing different event paths for fixed vs. mobile customers. Should've been simple. Wasn't.
We built everything on Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Kubernetes.
Nothing fancy or bleeding-edge—just reliable tools that get the job done. Sometimes the best technology is the boring technology that actually works.
What Actually Worked:
What I'd Do Differently:
I wish I could say these were profound insights, but they're just battle scars from another integration war.
The moral? Even "simple" customer experiences like changing a Netflix plan can require ridiculous technical orchestration behind the scenes.
Was it worth it? Absolutely. Millions of customers can now seamlessly manage their Netflix subscriptions while maintaining their billing relationship with the telecom.
Clean code. Clean architecture. Happy customers. Less manual work.
And really, isn't that the whole point? Building systems that solve real problems for real people—while letting computers do what they do best.
Because in the end, I don't just write code. I automate away the tedious parts of being human.
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