Am I missing something or could this be useful for non-mobile applications as well like HTML/JS apps if they provided an API outside of the iOS/Android SDKs?
Amazon Cognito
51–60 of 166 posts
Re: Amazon Cognito
#52The 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?
You probably don't. You also don't get grandma to run her own power plant, telephone switching network, etc. As long as her "stuff" is portable, it really doesn't matter who provides the service
Re: Amazon Cognito
#53I 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…
Out of their recently-launched services, I liked the name "MatchBook" the most. It was intended to provide cheap or free Kindle versions of books which you'd previously purchased physical versions of. Unfortunately, it's a product that virtually no publishers have adopted.
Re: Amazon Cognito
#54I would love to know if there are any open source alternatives to such solution.
Closet alternative, I have seen till now, is Pouchdb https://github.com/pouchdb/pouchdb
Re: Amazon Cognito
#55Looking into the service, the identify providers they support are Amazon (naturally), Google and Facebook.
Re: Amazon Cognito
#56The 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 lov…
Yes, users care about this but like most things you have to segment the market appropriately. I meet more and more people who are wary of putting all their trust/data/etc into only one provider, be that Google, Apple or anyone else. It's not just a privacy thing but a growing awareness of the sheer dependency on that one company. (Aside: I have to say FB is being pretty clever by buying up apps and letting them stay 'independent' - users don't notice that as much and reminds me of FMCG.).
We don't need most users in the beginning. Just those that are technically savvy enough to understand the landscape and the way the world is headed. From there we can develop more stuff and eventually get it into a state ready for the masses. For example, I can run my personal website as a unikernel [1], which is not suitable for mom-and-pop but great for anyone currently using any static site generators. As more libraries get released I can build on that an eventually run more of my infrastructure this way (my prototypical examples are mail, contacts and calendars).
In terms of the friction for developers, we simply have to make the libraries and tooling fun and easy to use. With well-designed systems it's not necessarily any more friction that what developers have to do now (i.e build their own backend).
> "All that said, I'd love to be proven wrong and see an implementation that is killer enough to solve these problems."
We're working on it.
[1] http://amirchaudhry.com/from-jekyll-to-unikernel-in-fifty-li...
Re: Amazon Cognito
#57I 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…
They're unique while remaining loosely related to the products they describe.
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%B3calo is the city center (of Mexico City's historical district), a simple and untaken metaphor for a service that "...provides users with a central location for both the documents and files they are...".
Re: Amazon Cognito
#58With 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…
I am unaware of AWS modules discontinued by amazon, but it is also true that the oldest services are the most popular (S3, EC2) while some of the most recent ones have a (apparently?) smaller user base (SWF, Kinesis, AppStream).
I think I remember amazon people saying they are actually dogfooding this stuff so it should stay available for a long time anyway, rather than being a random Google Reader.
Re: Amazon Cognito
#59Is 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…
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Re: Amazon Cognito
#60Am I missing something or could this be useful for non-mobile applications as well like HTML/JS apps if they provided an API outside of the iOS/Android SDKs?
You're right. And considering they have just added Cognito support to their Node.js SDK, we can suppose this is the master plan.
http://aws.amazon.com/releasenotes/JavaScript/99205414836272...