Design a Authentication for Supabase
Last updated: April 5, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Supabase
System Design
Product Manager
Supabase
April 5, 2026Product Manager
System Design Round
System Design
Medium
121
11
2,583 solved
Design a real-time authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Supabase asks this during the System Design Round 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
Database selection and data modeling
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
Security and authentication
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 would you handle a region-wide outage?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Registration: Users should be able to register using email/password or OAuth providers (Google, GitHub, etc.).
- User Login: Users can log in to their acco...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- User Base: Assume 10 million active users.
- Authentication Requests: On average, assume each user logs in 3 times a week:
- 10 million users * 3 logi...
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