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Amazon Cognito

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Re: Amazon Cognito

#31

Post by mnglkhn2 »

yourad_io wrote: post #10

While this (and other similar) Backend-aaS look very appealing at first glance, it seems to suffer from the same problem as most AWS offerings - terrible platform lock-in. Show me that I could move all of this to another provider if I need to, and then we can talk seriously. I also wonder how they "manage[s] the complexity of conflict resolution" without manual intervention.

The trick with your suggestion of making data more portable is that if Amazon or any other platform provider would do so, then it would create a race to the bottom in terms of price. This would make the business quickly unappealing for the likes of Amazon. This is why no one will make their platform formats portable. At least not while things are in flux and the battle field is still disputed. Once the market matures (see the mobile telephony of 2000s) then you'll be able to port your phone number.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#32

Post by moonlighter »

fragsworth wrote: post #16

With so many new AWS features rolling out, I am worried that Amazon is spreading themselves too thin and will soon decide to stop supporting some of their less-popular services that I happen to be using. As far as I can tell, there is no guarantee anywhere that they'll maintain any service for any length of time. If that happens, it could waste weeks or months of engineering time trying to migrate to something else,…

It's a valid concern. AWS has been around for many years now with numerous services. Has there been a single offering which they retired or stopped supporting? I'm not aware of one.

Amazon doesn't just create services, throws them over the wall and see if they stick. Rather, they almost always RESPOND to customer requests. Dr. Werner Vogels, AWS's CTO makes a point about that approach at about any keynote he gives. Similarly, they try to also avoid feature creep by only providing features which customers really ask for.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#34

Post by amirmc »

The interesting thing about all these services is that they're trying to abstract away the same types of problems that all developers come across: Identity, connectivity, sync/backup (and to some extent, deployment).

A different (and more disruptive?) approach to this would be to put more control of these things into the hands of end-users such that they provide the 'backend' into which you (the developer) load your application. i.e something like the app-store model but it connects to the user's 'personal cloud' (or the desktops of old - if you prefer). Such a system needs to be FOSS at its core but with a way for developers to get paid for providing value to end-users (who themselves get control of their data/networks).

Of course, this won't happen overnight, but the alternative is that everyone ends up using proprietary silos, with huge lock-in and innovation suffers as the tech giants get distracted with lawsuits.

I'm working with others on the distributed systems infrastructure we need to make this possible [1], so that we can get to a place where everyone can have their own piece of the cloud. In fact, one of the major components of this is Mirage, which has been discussed quite a bit on HN recently [2].

[1] http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020125 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8005130 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726748

Re: Amazon Cognito

#35

Post by jkarneges »

mnglkhn2 wrote: post #31
yourad_io wrote: post #10

While this (and other similar) Backend-aaS look very appealing at first glance, it seems to suffer from the same problem as most AWS offerings - terrible platform lock-in. Show me that I could move all of this to another provider if I need to, and then we can talk seriously. I also wonder how they "manage[s] the complexity of conflict resolution" without manual intervention.

The trick with your suggestion of making data more portable is that if Amazon or any other platform provider would do so, then it would create a race to the bottom in terms of price. This would make the business quickly unappealing for the likes of Amazon. This is why no one will make their platform formats portable. At least not while things are in flux and the battle field is still disputed. Once the market matures…

At Fanout.io (not BaaS like Cognito, but another kind of microservice) we opened everything up to make us easy to migrate off of. Why wait for the market to mature when we can do things the way customers want from the start?

See you at the race to the bottom!

Re: Amazon Cognito

#36

Post by nmcfarl »

fragsworth wrote: post #16

With so many new AWS features rolling out, I am worried that Amazon is spreading themselves too thin and will soon decide to stop supporting some of their less-popular services that I happen to be using. As far as I can tell, there is no guarantee anywhere that they'll maintain any service for any length of time. If that happens, it could waste weeks or months of engineering time trying to migrate to something else,…

I am not too concerned about this – though I do think it's a valid concern considering the actions of other players in the space.

Sitting here in Seattle I see Amazon hoovering up all the local talent they can hire. And I see them putting up new tower after new tower to house them. I don't worry about them stretching themselves too thin as far as manpower goes.

And they don't have a history of closing down AWS products – for instance the first, (and not a runaway hit) Mechanical Turk is still with us.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#37

Post by bradly »

moonlighter wrote: post #32
fragsworth wrote: post #16

With so many new AWS features rolling out, I am worried that Amazon is spreading themselves too thin and will soon decide to stop supporting some of their less-popular services that I happen to be using. As far as I can tell, there is no guarantee anywhere that they'll maintain any service for any length of time. If that happens, it could waste weeks or months of engineering time trying to migrate to something else,…

It's a valid concern. AWS has been around for many years now with numerous services. Has there been a single offering which they retired or stopped supporting? I'm not aware of one. Amazon doesn't just create services, throws them over the wall and see if they stick. Rather, they almost always RESPOND to customer requests. Dr. Werner Vogels, AWS's CTO makes a point about that approach at about any keynote he gives. S…

SimpleDB is the closest I believe. It's still around if you are using it, but it isn't in the web console anymore.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#39

Post by Iftheshoefits »

yourad_io wrote: post #10

While this (and other similar) Backend-aaS look very appealing at first glance, it seems to suffer from the same problem as most AWS offerings - terrible platform lock-in. Show me that I could move all of this to another provider if I need to, and then we can talk seriously. I also wonder how they "manage[s] the complexity of conflict resolution" without manual intervention.

I'm a bit confused by your objection to "platform lock-in." Presumably a person or company who has chosen to use this service understands the technical limitations and features it entails. That includes understanding that AWS may in fact implement this service differently than other providers do and that a future move might entail some non-trivial effort. That isn't platform lock-in in any meaningful sense.

Besides, what makes you think you would be prevented from moving all this to another provider? From the FAQ (https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/faqs/), it seems that Cognito data is stored in a straight-forward Key-Value scheme. That's about as easy as it gets when it comes to data structure.

Moreover, the actual service itself would almost certainly be implemented differently with another provider. Why should Amazon, or anybody else who offers similar "menu of services" cloud computing, make it easy for you to do so (they make money off of you not moving)?

Re: Amazon Cognito

#40

Post by jflowers45 »

I'm definitely finding it interesting to see Amazon releasing more and more offerings to make life as a developer easier. Will be interesting to see whether they can leverage some of these services to make developing for the Fire phone extra appealing.
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