The special sauce was establishing standards that were used across the code base that we could detect. For example, all configs were from environment variables

The special sauce was establishing standards that were used across the code base that we could detect. For example, all configs were from environment variables in the form of `<ServiceName>_<DestinationName>_URL` or something. If the foobar services wants to talk to the auth service it would read the environment variable `FOOBAR_AUTH_URL`. Then, from conventions like this you can build libraries/tools and layer them on to simplify. The way you write your deployments can also know about this convention and automatically generate the environment variables you need (didn't get to this point). I hope one day I get a chance to work on building some tooling like this, open sourcing it, and making it easy for others to adopt a similar mentality.