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Amazon Cognito

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Re: Amazon Cognito

#141

Post by akrymski »

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…

Completely agree! At post.fm we're trying to design an email client which will work offline, and synchronize data when online (IMAP isn't sufficient for our needs) - Exchange style. We've thought long and hard about various solutions, and have tried syncing logic-less document-stores such as this. As you say - this doesn't really work, and there's definitely no way to handle anything remotely complex like transactions. In our case "app data" is effectively all your mail and more, and we can't expect each client to have a local copy of everything, meaning partial syncing of a collection is important for us (not something any solution out here seems to handle).

The solution we've come up with, which we'll hopefully get to open-source one day, is to model state over time as a persistent "event log", which means instead of syncing documents we sync events that clients perform, replaying events instead of document-update statements. This approach is infinitely flexible I believe, but requires more work if your clients are written in different languages (we use JS throughout so that isn't an issue).

Re: Amazon Cognito

#142

Post by spartango »

riffraff wrote: post #58
moonlighter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AWS definitely dogfoods, to the point where people have to be careful internally to not create circular dependencies (this nearly happened to me once).

I think there's a notion of persistence in AWS' leadership that propagates through the teams. AWS is willing to fight through the early painful years for products to see them arrive at the stage that EC2/S3 have attained.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#143

Post by enos_feedler »

snom380 wrote: post #135
pbreit wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't CouchBase Mobile Sync Gateway do something similar?

Couchbase Mobile using Sync Gateway is incredibly similar to Amazon Cognito. Even the native iOS and Android libraries have a similar feel to them (object-mapping with native objective-c objects, single call sync/replication function). Sync gateway has built in support for identity providers such as Facebook, but doesn't provide Google or Amazon identity support (this could easily be added with custom server code).

The big difference I am seeing here is Amazon Cognito doesn't yet have a story around syncing documents between multiple users/roles. Sync gateway has the notion of a sync function that providers developers with a hook to customize server-side syncing in a deeper way.

I'll be interested to see how Amazon developers the multi-user/role sync capabilities and integrates it with their native identity management solution. Could be very compelling down the road..

Re: Amazon Cognito

#145

Post by monksy »

walterbell wrote: post #103
jmathai wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent the last 3 years under this hypothesis [1][2][3]. In those 3 years I've come to realize that users don't actually care that much. Sure a subset of users care but the majority don't. I think the "personal cloud" that makes sense both architecturally and in the minds of consumers looks very different from what we as developers understand it to be. When we took our software and began prototyping it on hardware d…

Can you put it on the Seagate Wireless Drive? This has a simple value proposition: Apple charges $100 for incremental 16/32/64 GB mobile storage. Users can buy 2TB worth of wifi storage for $200 and replacement firmware+source ( http://www.hackseagatesatellite.com/ ) for $35.

I perfer Synology's DiskStation over that. At least with that it'll give me a RAID array to back up my files.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#146

Post by elliottpayne »

quadrangle wrote: post #126
josh2600 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> time and again we've shown that those are not things consumers want or are willing to pay for CITATION please. I think we have never seen such things. We've not had studies that control for all other factors and then conclude that users don't want control and privacy. I think your claim is flat out wrong. You're taking the fact that most users won't sacrifice by using a lower-quality, obscure thing for privacy and…

I would look towards the trajectory of Path, and the fate of app.net for your evidence of the preferences of end users vis-a-vis paying a premium for privacy and security relative to free alternatives that make no such claims (Facebook and Twitter, respectively).

Re: Amazon Cognito

#147

Post by oh_sigh »

tn13 wrote: post #133
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…

Users don't care about. Not worth doing.

Your comment wasn't worth doing. Neither was mine.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#148

Post by hqm »

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…

There was an MIT startup, Permabit, that tried to make a cloud based storage system which backed your own local disk. One idea was that your local storage is faster so you should use it for local things, and offline computation, but that if a shadow copy was being backed to the cloud in encrypted fashion. If your local storage fails, you just replace it, and the data dribbles back in from the cloud to your new local device.

They also had some hack whereby large common files (like app executables) where compressed using their hash code or something, but that is not the important idea in my opinion.

I think having that transparent local/cloud duality is one piece of the puzzle for a service which is both fast and local and also cloud based. You shouldn't have to care where your data lives. The other pieces of the puzzle are how to grant fine grained shared access without confusing users and introducing security holes.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#149

Post by mturkisgreat »

nmcfarl wrote: post #36
fragsworth wrote: post #16

With 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,…

I am not too concerned about this – though I do think it's a valid concern considering the actions of other players in the space. Sitting here in Seattle I see Amazon hoovering up all the local talent they can hire. And I see them putting up new tower after new tower to house them. I don't worry about them stretching themselves too thin as far as manpower goes. And they don't have a history of closing down AWS produc…

Mturk is heavily used internally and in academia for a crazy variety of stuff. It's not S3, but it's hugely important for the people it serves; it would be incredibly foolish to shut it down.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#150

Post by tracker1 »

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 was actually thinking something like this for dropbox would be a no brainer.. like a cloudmail client for all your accounts, or an igoogle/ireader service that's hosted and uses your dropbox for its' data.
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