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Amazon Cognito

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Re: Amazon Cognito

#41

Post by danso »

bellerocky wrote: post #14

I don't know how Amazon comes up with names for its products, but recently they all strike me as weird and stupid names. Do they confer with marketing first? Zocalo, Cognito? Really? These are the kinds of names you invent when you're looking for a cheap domain name for your startup. For Amazon, they don't make a lot of sense. They just seem like some executive out of their marketing depth and out of touch trying to…

What cloud service names, off the top of your head, do you consider to be exemplary?

"Parse"? OK, sure...but that's not any more functionally descriptive than "Cognito"...and Parse is a more narrowly focused company with a primary service...In the case of "Cognito" and "Zocalo"..., Amazon has to come up with names that are distinctive because they provide so many core services...so many that even me, an engineer, get them confused. Imagine the difficulty of a fly-by marketing person trying to differentiate between similar sounding names.

Furthermore, these names are distinctive industry wide...presumably, if Zocalo becomes big, you will no longer have to say "AWS Zocalo", but just, "Zocalo"...just like you do with "S3" and "EC2".

To drive home the situation that Amazon is in, let's consider another great product name: Dropbox. Unlike Parse, it is very easy to relate to the core service. But consider the phrase, "Amazon Dropbox"..."Dropbox" is unique compared to the currently named AWS services...but it has a huge collision with Amazon's core service, which is, stocking and shipping products. If Dropbox.com didn't exist, and Amazon used it instead of "Zocalo"...there is a considerable risk that people associate "dropbox" with some kind of packaging thing.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#43

Post by michaelmior »

amirmc wrote: post #34

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…

Do users really care about this? My guess is that 99% don't and don't want to deal with these details. The project sounds cool and like something the HN crowd might want, but my intuition is that most users won't understand the implications.

It also adds an extra step in the data storage process within the app, which increases friction and seems like it would be hard to get developers to adopt. All that said, I'd love to be proven wrong and see an implementation that is killer enough to solve these problems.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#44

Post by sophacles »

Is there anything like this in the enterprise space? Many of our customers want authentication against their internal Active Directory or other single sign-on solution. It would be nice if there was a company that exported an api, and did all the work of connecting up the various types of auth, so that we can focus on our own product rather than redo integration work that has probably been done by many other companies already, probably even for the customer's other services.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#45

Post by mkr-hn »

hodgesmr wrote: post #9
matthewarkin wrote: post #7

So Amazon is now competing with Facebook / Parse?

And new iCloud. And new Dropbox API. And Helios.

Does Apple consider iCloud a competitor to other cloud services? You need an Apple device to sign up for it, so you can't move to it if you only have access to Android or Windows devices.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#46

Post by ebiester »

amirmc wrote: post #34

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…

The big thing is each individual user would then be responsible for maintaining their own individual cloud. Otherwise, they'll just outsource that out and we're no better than before.

How do you get grandma on her own personal cloud?

Re: Amazon Cognito

#47

Post by rschmitty »

amirmc wrote: post #34

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…

> A different 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.

User Dependency Injection!

Re: Amazon Cognito

#48

Post by michaelmior »

yalogin wrote: post #19

Isn't there a startup that does this already? Seems way too intuitive and natural to not have happen already.

There are many startups which do this (or at least similar) already. It's often referred to as "backend as a service" (BaaS). Some links below, but you'll find many more via Google.

http://www.kinvey.com/ https://backendless.com/ https://www.parse.com/ http://www.baasbox.com/

Re: Amazon Cognito

#49

Post by skram »

sophacles wrote: post #44

Is there anything like this in the enterprise space? Many of our customers want authentication against their internal Active Directory or other single sign-on solution. It would be nice if there was a company that exported an api, and did all the work of connecting up the various types of auth, so that we can focus on our own product rather than redo integration work that has probably been done by many other companie…

Have you seen Stormpath?

Re: Amazon Cognito

#50

Post by CaveTech »

amirmc wrote: post #34

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…

Isn't that what App.net was supposed to be? By most standards that project was a huge failure. It's hard to proposition a user to start managing their own silo.
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