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Amazon Cognito

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Re: Amazon Cognito

#61

Post by mynegation »

michaelmior wrote: post #43
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 lov…

I do, but, granted, I am a typical HN reader, not a typical user. I want my data either to be encrypted by the key that only I have, before being sent to the online storage service, and/or being sent to the computer that I physically control (NAS at my home).

The reasoning that users do not want to maintain that infrastructure is a very valid one. However, it is like having a car vs. using public transportation. Most car owners do not maintain their car themselves, but at least you can remove your personal items from the trunk before you drive it to the mechanic.

Now the question is does this analogy extends to the advantages of using your own car vs public transportation. My guess is that need for privacy could be one big driver, but the company that can make home computing infrastructure an item of conspicuous consumption will be a big winner. Think Apple or Sonos, but in terms of what comes next (Augmented Reality, Voice HCI etc).

Re: Amazon Cognito

#62

Post by mindcrime »

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #39
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,…

Because the best way to get a user to "move in" is to make it easy for them to "move out". It's actually in Amazon's financial interest to make it easy for people to move off of their offerings.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#63

Post by skram »

athrun wrote: post #60
skram wrote: post #51

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?

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...

Thanks for the link!

Re: Amazon Cognito

#64

Post by johnchristopher »

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…

Wouldn't Dropbox Apps, even though it isn't open source, be a good start for your requirements ?

Re: Amazon Cognito

#65

Post by toomuchtodo »

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #39
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,…

> Presumably a person or company who has chosen to use this service understands the technical limitations and features it entails.

That's a pretty big assumption to make. People, even technical people, make assumptions all the time that they'll be able to get their data out of a system and then aren't able to at a future date.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#66

Post by mamcx »

Anything like this but for relational data? I need to sync a sqlite database and my attemps of using this kind of service show me are not really a good fit.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#67

Post by ColinCera »

skram wrote: post #51

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?

It says on the page they provide a web service API accessible to any application.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#68

Post by JTon »

extesy wrote: post #8
JTon wrote: post #2

How did this float to the top of my front page so quickly. Are we all genuinely _that_ interested in new AWS products? or did this post receive some "extra" help

This makes Amazon competitors to various backend-as-a-service startups (like Parse), so yes, it's interesting.

Yeah, it does appear to a hot topic. Still, the post was <10m old and #1 with 0 comments. Seems either extremely overhyped or artificial to me.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#69

Post by pbreit »

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.

Is anyone delivering the equivalent with less lock-in? I can understand both sides of the argument but it seems that over time stuff always migrates towards more control (ie, people migrate OFF of Parse, Heroku, AWS, etc). I'd envision a much better set of images, Fabric/Chef recipes, to the point where you get your AWS but with vanilla OSS on generic hosting providers.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#70

Post by dperfect »

Why do so many people (and companies) pretend that app backends are just (logic-less) data stores?

I can definitely see the argument that some mobile games only need to store/sync some basic state information on behalf of the user, but I just don't see it as being that simple for most other apps.

I suppose this datastore-only backend model works for apps with users who are completely isolated from each other, but any time you want to allow users to interact with each other (or provide rules for how their resources interact with the world outside their little "user bubble"), you need business logic that resides somewhere other than the app; otherwise, your business logic (which may affect more than just the authenticated user) is in an untrusted environment. Not only that, but there are huge scalability problems associated with using a logic-less backend storage model if you want to do anything that involves more than just a single user's data.

Even for games, something as simple as providing a leaderboard is impossible (or extremely impractical) with this model. If you have no server-side logic to perform aggregate operations over multiple users, the only other option you'd have is to basically grab all the data and perform those operation in your app, which is absurd.

Backend development, server management, and deployment can be hard (though many PaaS solutions are making it easier than ever), but personally I'd never recommend building an app with a logic-less backend data store like this. Even if you don't think you'll need it today, in most cases you're going to need logic on the backend eventually. If you've started with this, you're just creating a lot more work for yourself when you finally do need to implement a feature that crosses the line from isolated-users-only to users-that-can-interact (or even just obtaining aggregate user data for business intelligence purposes).

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