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Amazon Cognito

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Re: Amazon Cognito

#71

Post by 650REDHAIR »

mindcrime wrote: post #62
Iftheshoefits wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bingo!

This is one of our core values and while we get odd looks from investors or MBA-types we know that it's the right move to make in the long run. This is the way things are moving and I hope that more companies will go this route.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#72

Post by idea_shot »

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…

Check out Mobile Identity Connect -> http://www.kinvey.com/blog/3856/mobile-identity-for-the-ente... and http://devcenter.kinvey.com/ios/guides/auth-link-for-ldap

Re: Amazon Cognito

#73

Post by 300bps »

dperfect wrote: post #70

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…

As the description says:

instead of having to worry about building and managing a backend solution to handle identity management, network state, storage, and sync.

From my reading of this, this wouldn't in any way obviate the need for a backend system of your own. It just does the identity management, network state, storage and sync parts for you. Your own business logic on your own backend can use this to jump start you.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#74

Post by SimianLogic2 »

seems kind of expensive for what it does.

imagine a game with 100k DAU (big, but not huge)

2 sessions per user per day

say 10 "saves" per session

100,000 * 2 * 10 = 2 million synchs / 10k * $0.15 = $30/day

for $900/month you could do FAR better just rolling your own

these numbers are all reasonable for a mobile game... so it seems to me that the main use pattern would be for apps that don't need to synch very often. and if an app doesn't synch very often, why even bother throwing an auth wall at your users?

Re: Amazon Cognito

#75

Post by josh2600 »

amirmc wrote: post #56
michaelmior wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I thought like this once.

Futurists have a tendency to imagine a world of changed human behavior and it's compelling to do so. The reality is that the future rarely arrives as sweeping change, but rather as metaphor and specialization.

Whereas you can imagine others adopting new patterns of behavior because you understand the underlying reasons why such behavior is reasonable, the metaphor through which you explain this change is not readily understood. Why, as a User do I want this? If the answer is control and privacy, you might be barking up the wrong tree (time and again we've shown that those are not things consumers want or are willing to pay for).

If you want to drive dynamic change in the world, you have to change the underlying structure of complicated systems while steadfastly avoiding changes in user behavior. It turns out this is quite hard.

I applaud your efforts but encourage you to avoid the rabbit hole of endless specialization and to improve the marketing metaphor/rhetoric.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#76

Post by dperfect »

300bps wrote: post #73
dperfect wrote: post #70

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…

As the description says: instead of having to worry about building and managing a backend solution to handle identity management, network state, storage, and sync. From my reading of this, this wouldn't in any way obviate the need for a backend system of your own. It just does the identity management, network state, storage and sync parts for you. Your own business logic on your own backend can use this to jump start…

From the video:

> Building the backend... is a lot of work. You have to build it, deploy it, and manage the infrastructure that it runs on."

To me, it certainly sounds like they're trying to market this as an alternative to having your own backend system.

And to be perfectly honest, if you do use your own backend system for anything, authentication and simple data storage are not hard to add - especially if you're going to use a SSO service like Amazon, Facebook, or Google (which Cognito uses). There are drop-in solutions for most of those things that require little more than a couple lines of app code to authenticate users. I really just have a hard time seeing the value in what Cognito offers.

Also, assuming you do just use Cognito for the auth and storage/sync parts, how do you plan to use that data in the rest of your backend system? Are you going to pull down all that data from Amazon's servers just to do what you need with it (will they even offer that ability)? If so, how do you make sure the rest of your backend infrastructure stays in sync with Amazon's user data? It just sounds like it creates a lot more complexity than actually solving anything (except in the most basic scenarios without a need for a separate backend system).

Re: Amazon Cognito

#77

Post by rektide »

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…

Users won't care, until someone else builds on the liberated data of your app.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#78

Post by mtbcoder »

rstupek wrote: post #52
ebiester wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If her "stuff" is that portable and the service provider has at least some kind of read access, how would one prevent the service provider from simply keeping a mirror of Grandma's data on their own servers?

Re: Amazon Cognito

#79

Post by chaz »

dperfect wrote: post #70

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…

I don't think anyone suggests that it's that simple. This entire space is young and evolving quickly. Identity and data sync is a good place to start, though.

For your example of a leaderboard, Parse has Cloud Code. It's designed to do exactly what you describe -- define a function that sits on Parse's server, handles client queries against your data, and returns the relevant data. Their example is for computing the average rating for a movie from your users' reviews: https://parse.com/docs/cloud_code_guide#functions

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft aren't there yet, but I can only imagine it's on their roadmap. And Parse's implementation only works for fairly easy stuff. But I think things will look very different in 5 years.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#80

Post by glynjackson »

This may sound stupid, so I apologise in advance for my ignorance....

I watched the video and the focus of this service seems to be on storing user data in a way that can be accessed by any device. I'm an API developer, isn't this just what every mobile app that uses an API to store data does, right? I personally don't write a different backend datastore for every device type that could connect to it, nor do I 'permanently' store data on the device! user data is always synced 'for me' over an API. I don't get this, can someone explain why we need this service? Do people develop apps different from me? I'm not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely interested.

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