How a Billing Platform Replaced Its Homegrown Auth System with Google Identity

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A multi-tenant billing platform had long relied on a misappropriated OAuth2 client_credentials flow to authenticate users, effectively treating each user as an OAuth client with their email and BCrypt password hash. The system worked for years but quietly became fragile load-bearing infrastructure that no one was formally responsible for maintaining. Three factors forced a change: parent company security mandates, enterprise customers requesting SSO via Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra ID, and the growing cost of sustaining a custom identity stack. The team migrated to Google Identity Platform, leveraging their existing Google Cloud infrastructure, with token verification handled via the Firebase Admin SDK and standard Spring resource server configuration. Rather than running a dual-auth transition period, all five backend repositories and the frontend were cut over on a single day, a deliberate choice to avoid doubling the authentication surface that engineers needed to reason about.

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