Amazon Cognito

User Identity and Access Management

As mobile usage has dramatically increased over the years, it is more relevant than ever to design for mobile and work backward towards the desktop. Working back like this creates a need to get users of these mobile apps and web applications, this is where Amazon Cognito comes into play.

Amazon Cognito allows you to easily add user sign in and sign out to your mobile apps and web apps. Also, Amazon Cognito enables you to save data locally on your user devices, allowing your applications to work, even when your devices are offline. You can then synchronize data across user devices, so the app experience remains consistent regardless of the device you use.

Amazon Cognito provides an authentication mechanism for your mobile app. Once a user has been authenticated, they will have access to your AWS services linked to the application. Amazon Cognito even provides a mechanism to grant unauthenticated users access to your AWS services. Additionally, Amazon Cognito sync allows you to sync data across devices, which means that users will have a unified experience no matter the platform.

User identity is the unique identifier you associated with a particular end-user. The three mechanisms that facilitate this are authentication, authorization, and user management. Authentication provides the entry point for your users to sign in. This is the place where you would also enable federation with enterprise and social identity. Authorization allows you to protect data and operations. This is the place you provide fine grade access control. Finally, user management is where you manage user lifecycles, storing and managing user profile data, and where you would monitor user engagement.

There are two ways to federate with Amazon Cognito; Cognito user pools and Cognito identity pools.
1. Cognito user pools allow you to create and maintain a user directory and add sign up and sign in into your mobile app or web application. User pools scale to hundreds of millions of users and are designed to supply simple, secure, low-cost options for you.
2. Cognito identity pools allow you to create unique identities for your users and federate then with identity providers at no cost. With that identity, you can obtain temporary, limited privilege AWS credentials to synchronize data for Amazon Cognito sync or directly access other AWS services.

With federation, you can link user information stored across multiple separate and decent management systems. Cognito handles these interactions to authenticate users and receive tokens. These identity providers are configuring Cognito. Cognito user pools act as a universal directory, providing user-profiles and authentication tokens for federated and native users.

Let Amazon Cognito handle your authentication needs. Cloud Rush has partnered with Amazon Web Services to provide you with AWS services such as Cognito. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation for Amazon Cognito.