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Amazon Cognito

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon Cognito

#81

Post by todd3834 »

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,…

Sounds like it saved you a lot of time getting your app up and running and I'm assuming they would give you a lot of time to migrate before just shutting it down. I wouldn't worry about this, however, this is something to consider any time you use a 3rd party to manage a service for you. I've had issues with fully managed RackSpace servers where the OS hit its EOL and it was on me to migrate everything to a new server. I've had this issue with fully managed database providers when they migrated to a new infrastructure and I had to move my data into a new database. There are other examples but most of them are pretty minor and none of them were too big of a deal.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#82

Post by plorkyeran »

JTon wrote: post #68
extesy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

New product announcements from large tech companies make it to #1 before getting any comments on a regular basis. Submitting a duplicate URL counts as an upvote for the original submission, so it's pretty easy for something like this to make it to #1 just from people racing to be the first one to submit it.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#83

Post by xhroot »

jonknee wrote: post #17
bellerocky wrote: post #14

I 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…

Amazon is a weird name too.

As were the originally proposed names "Cadabra" and "Relentless" (http://www.relentless.com still redirects to Amazon).

Re: Amazon Cognito

#84

Post by sophacles »

idea_shot wrote: post #72
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

Thanks for the pointer. This particular service is useful to know about, but a bit more mobile focused than is appropriate for our current product. Noted for future reference tho!

Re: Amazon Cognito

#85

Post by sophacles »

skram wrote: post #49
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…

Have you seen Stormpath?

I have now. Thanks for the pointer!

Re: Amazon Cognito

#86

Post by dave1619 »

So, can someone correct me if I'm wrong? It appears that Amazon Cognito handles sync for local device data, but the developer doesn't have access to any of that data. Correct?

So this service seems to be geared toward developers who don't want to store or see user data at all. But for a developer that wants to gather user data (for crowdsourced insights) or for a developer that wants to offer a web app connected to their own DB, then this isn't going to work.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#87

Post by drewcrawford »

pbreit wrote: post #69
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.

I'm working on this. Email in profile.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#88

Post by centropy »

pbreit wrote: post #69
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.

I'm trying out DreamFactory (dreamfactory.com) to see if I can accomplish the same goals but using something that's open source (Apache License). Sure I'll have to maintain my own VPS boxes but that's something I do anyway.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#89

Post by wutbrodo »

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 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.

I'd be wary of assuming from this data point that people are willing to be even slightly inconvenienced for it. Just take a look at Facebook: the entire history of the company has been one of disrespecting and subsequently pissing off users, and yet out of the huge amount of people I know who have repeatedly expressed anger at how Facebook treats their users, I know exactly one person who stopped using it or even reduced their usage.

I'm not sure whether your assumption that people's concern will translate into even the slightest bit of action is sound.

Re: Amazon Cognito

#90

Post by walterbell »

josh2600 wrote: post #75
amirmc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Rhetoric from a16z in a thread of 50+ tweets:

"Bitcoin, billions of phones, and NSA eavesdropping are among trends that may eventually result in cloud successor: data-local computing"

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/487403585445978112

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