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Amazon Cognito

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon Cognito

#111

Post by sib »

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.

Joel wrote about this back in 2000. Barriers to exits become their own barriers to entry. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html

Re: Amazon Cognito

#112

Post by JPKab »

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…

What a great idea. Good luck with this sir! Please keep us all updated on your progress.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#113

Post by nni »

SimianLogic2 wrote: post #74

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.…

interesting. Higher than their example pricing which was based on 500k sessions/month with a sync at begin and end (https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/).

I find the aws pricing (and "cloud pricing" in general) fairly confusing, and the things is that you have to be so careful that the wrong checkbox isn't checked or something that opens the spigot to the credit card# you had to enter to try out the service on the free tier in the first place. Note that I saw that you can get an alert when it first charges anything via billing alerts (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/awsgsg-intr...), but still...

Re: Amazon Cognito

#114

Post by nni »

cobrabyte wrote: post #110
yalogin wrote: post #19

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

Strongloop has http://loopback.io which has been interesting to work with. Looking to free up some time to investigate a little further!

there's a lot of energy/activity with the strongloop project - I am looking at that as well... and now Cognito will demand my attention, too :)

Re: Amazon Cognito

#115

Post by walterbell »

tdaltonc wrote: post #93
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…

I'm really intrigued by this model of internet infrastructure. Would you mind helping me understand the relevant difference between what you, Sandstorm[1], and OpenPDS[2] are doing? [1] https://sandstorm.io/ [2] http://openpds.media.mit.edu/

OpenPDS = US gov-defined policy (NSTIC) for access to personal data

Sandstorm = packaging & separation of web apps from policy-managed data

Nymote & Mirage = UK systems research (OS, storage) on strong enforcement of claims similar but not limited to those being made in the above two projects

Re: Amazon Cognito

#116

Post by cobralibre »

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…

For various meanings of "like this", there's also Okta, Ping Identity, UnboundID, Forgerock...

Re: Amazon Cognito

#117

Post by GregorStocks »

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…

Parse/Cognito/etc allow you to quickly validate an idea that may or may not work out without having to invest in a backend engineer and a bunch of backend infrastructure. If it doesn't work, you've saved a bunch of time and money. If it does work, then you can start worrying about how to scale it and add more features. No piece of software has ever launched without technical debt, and there's much worse technical debt to take on than an outsourced backend.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#118

Post by tomschlick »

glynjackson wrote: post #80

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 'perma…

This service is for app devs who dont want/know how to to run their own servers. They are given a simple api to login/store info about a user in a user and it syncs automagically.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#119

Post by orandolabs »

The similarities between Cognito and EnduroSync (Orando Labs, https://orandolabs.com - announced in May) are striking. Including the latin sounding names. Except that EnduroSync is an object store and has no data size limitations. Even the pricing is similar.

As far as Hacker New goes, we announced EnduroSync back in May, and got no promotion. Not one up vote?

Re: Amazon Cognito

#120

Post by orandolabs »

yalogin wrote: post #19

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

Orando Labs (https://orandolabs.com) has EnduroSync and Identio. Striking similarities between the products. EnduroSync is a full object store and does not have the data size limitations.
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