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Alex Freberg

Founder of AnalystBuilder

Our Journey from

to

Quest for an Auth Provider

• We did not want to roll our own auth
• There were lot of existing auth providers
• Most of these providers were really
  expensive when scaling
• Firebase allowed integrating OAuth providers
  without an additional cost
• Firebase had a balanced pricing when
  we started(around 2022)

But it was
not perfect

• Firebase was missing Linkedin as an OAuth
  provider, which we wanted so bad
• It was a pain for the user when linking
  multiple identities with same email from
  different providers
• You are not allowed to customise certain
  email templates(like signup confirmation)
• Its quite heavy(on frontend)

But we decided
to
Keep it for launch!

Managed Databases

• We were using PostgreSQL(because its awesome 🙌)
• Our Infra is hosted on AWS EKS
• We were initially looking into AWS RDS for Managed DB
• It was really costly with connection pooler(pg-bouncer) 🤑
• AWS RDS has lot of pitfalls 😶‍🌫️

to rescue

• Reasonable pricing(25$ for starter) 😌
• Cloud Deployments
  • We deployed it in same AWS cloud region as our
    prod cluster
• Built in Connection Pooler 🤯
• Automated backups
• SQL Studio
• Lot of cool tools

Thats not Just DB

We get Auth as Well

We launched
the beta

Everything was fine

Until it wasn't

Firebase horror Stories

• We have integrated GitHub as OAuth
  provider, for some of users it wasn't working
• Terrible loading times
• People had trouble linking identities
• No way to observe auth audits or logs
  • We had a problem with Email provider
    and the only way was to guess what was it

We decided to move on

The Migration

• We were in a closed public beta with 7000 users
• Some of our apps were still using Firebase
• We wanted to have a seamless migration to
  Supabase while keeping Firebase

Flexible DB Schema

Migrating Users

• We used a script provided by Supabase team
  with few modifications to export users from
  Firebase to a JSON file(with a modification)
• Imported all users to Supabase Auth(its just SQL 😎)

• Populated user_providers table with SQL

• We decided to drop existing passwords and
  requested beta users to reset their passwords
• To be backward compatible we used a special header
  x-auth-provider to use Supabase auth with firebase
  auth

Good Bye

99% of login related
issues were resolved
with

• Blazing fast authentication 🚀
• More social providers(we enabled Linkedin) 🤟
• Automatically linking accounts with multiple
  identity providers 🤯
• Free 50K MAUs 🎉
• Audit Logs 🤖
• Customisable Email Templates for all actions 🤩
• Better observability with Logs 📜
• ⬇️ Bundle Size
• Allowed us to write Analytical Queries
  on auth data 📈

Everyone was Happy

Issues we faced with Supabase Auth

• Clock Skews
  • We observed some customers logout immediately
    after login 🙁
  • The problem was their System Clock, which is
    used by GoTrue(Supabase) to create tokens 💡
  • Fixing system clock resolved the issue ⏱️
  • Kudos to Supabase Support Team ❤️
• Sometimes clearing cookies help 🍪
• Redirect on timeout could be better
  • When this happen it redirect to the supabase api
    route

But we are more
than
Happy

With Supabase
we reached 50K+

💡 for using Supabase
as your
Database

• Supabase act as a great Database Provider
• Supabase uses RLS(Row Level Security) to protect
  data
• By default your data is public for unauthenticated users who can query through generated REST/GraphQL APIs
• Supabase warns about this
• You may need to run few SQL queries to disable
  access for anon key (https://shorturl.at/jOGmk)
• I hope Supabase team will make this process easier

Conclusions

• Supabase helped AnalystBuilder to Scale Up ⬆️
• Reduced Costs 💰
• Allowed doing great stuff with their Postgres
  based workflows ⚡️
• Lot of Good Stuff like Edge Functions 🤩
• Great community 😇
• Awesome support 🙌

Thank You

May The Postgres
Be With You

:end