Architect a multi-tenant Authentication Engine
Last updated: December 14, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Cockroach Labs
December 14, 202531
7
3,703 solved
Design a multi-tenant authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Cockroach Labs asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Multi-Tenant Support: The system should support multiple tenants with isolated authentication data.
- User Registration/Login: Users should be able to register...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations:
Assuming Cockroach Labs serves approximately 10 million users across 1,000 tenants:
- Total Requests: If each user logs in once a day, that results in about 10 m...
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