THE SITUATION
Our incident-management provider's Terraform plugin broke at our scale. With ~30 team stacks planning against one account, the upstream provider — which had removed its request throttling — died with rate-limit errors on parallel runs; two resources re-planned phantom changes on every single run; a data source hard-crashed on duplicate records. Team automation (case study 6) depended on all of it.
WHAT I DID
Forked and fixed in four days: a rate-limited HTTP client with retries that back off and add jitter (so thirty stacks don't retry in lockstep), the phantom-diff suppressions, deterministic duplicate resolution. Versioned honestly as 0.15.2-company.1 — upstream base plus a visible patch train — and filed each fix as an upstream issue with a written report, keeping the fork rebaseable and the maintainers informed.
A patched provider is useless until Terraform can download it — and that's why the company got an internal Terraform registry. I stood it up in the same three-day window: tag push → CI signs the build with a key it fetches at runtime (no signing key in CI secrets) → published to the registry, which serves the standard provider protocol from object storage. The provider pin in every team stack tells the story in one line:
firehydrant = {
source = "registry.example.com/platform/incident-provider"
version = "0.15.2-platform.5"
}The registry immediately outgrew its first tenant: it now hosts our own environment-lifecycle provider (case study 14) and mirrors the public registry for every provider we use — one governed, cached distribution point for all of Terraform.
THE INTERESTING PART
The host-everything layer mattered as much as the fix: the fork stayed rebaseable because its release train was explicit, and the registry made that fork the normal path instead of a special case.
WHAT IT CHANGED
A vendor's bug stopped being our outage; the escape hatch (fork + registry) became permanent infrastructure; and the whole org's provider supply chain got faster and more controlled as a side effect of fixing one broken plugin.