Design Authentication Infrastructure for real-time analytics
Last updated: April 12, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Palo Alto Networks
April 12, 20262
13
4,375 solved
Design a event-driven authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Onsite at Palo Alto Networks. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Palo Alto Networks values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
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 would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Authentication: The system should support OAuth 2.0 and JWT for secure authentication.
- Real-time Event Processing: The system must process authentication...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming an average of 10 million authentication requests per day:
- Peak Load Estimation: Consider a peak load of 200 requests per second (assuming 10% of daily load occurs in peak hours).
- **Da...
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