AMAZON COGNITO
Amazon Cognito is an Amazon Web Services product which controls the user authentication and access for mobile applications on internet-connected devices. This service helps to speed-up the application development by saving and synchronizing end user’s data, allowing an application developer to focus on writing code instead of building and managing the requisite back-end infrastructure. Explore this article and know what is it about and it’s features.
FEATURES OF AMAZON COGNITO
AMAZON COGNITO USER POOLS
A developer can create and maintain a user directory and can add sign-up and sign-in to the user’s mobile application or web application using Amazon Cognito User Pools. User pools scale up-to hundreds of millions of users and can provide simple, secure, and low-cost options for the developer.
The developer can also implement enhanced security features, such as email and phone number verification, and multi-factor authentication. In addition, Amazon Cognito User Pools lets the developer customize the workflows through AWS Lambda.
AMAZON COGNITO FEDERATED IDENTITIES
Amazon Cognito Federated Identities enables the developer to create unique identities for their users and authenticate them with federated identity providers. With a federated identity, a developer can obtain temporary or limited-privilege using AWS credentials to synchronize the data with Amazon Cognito Sync or to securely access other AWS services such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, and Amazon API Gateway. Amazon Cognito Federated Identities supports federated identity providers which include Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, OpenID Connect providers, and SAML identity providers and as-well-as unauthenticated identities. This feature also supports the developer authenticated identities, which allows to register and authenticate users through their own back-end authentication systems.
AMAZON COGNITO SYNC
Amazon Cognito Sync is an AWS service that supports offline access and cross-device syncing of application-related to user’s data. The developer can use Amazon Cognito Sync to synchronize the user’s profile data across mobile devices and the web without requiring the user’s own back end.
CREATING AND MANAGING USER POOLS
Create and maintain a user directory and add sign-up and sign-in to the user mobile app or web application using user pools. The user can use user pools to add user registration and sign-in features to your apps. Instead of using external identity providers such as Facebook, Google, or Twitter, a developer can also use user pools to let the users register with a sign-in to an app using an email address, phone number, or a user name. The user can also create custom registration fields and can store the metadata in their user directory. Users can verify their email addresses and phone numbers, recover passwords and can enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) with just a few lines of code.
User pools are for mobile and web application developers who want to handle user registration and can sign-in directly in their apps. Previously, a developer needed to implement their own user directory to create user accounts, store user profiles, and implement password recovery flows to support user registration and sign-in.
User pools integrate easily with the existing Amazon Cognito functionality for anonymous and social identities. In addition to that, a user can start as an anonymous user and then either sign in using a social identity or using user pools to register and sign in using email, phone number, or username.