Cognito Overview

• Cognito lets you add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to your web and mobile apps quickly and easily.

• Cognito scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers, such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0.

User Pools

• A user pool is a user directory in Cognito.

• With a user pool, your users can sign in to your web or mobile app through Cognito, or federate through a third-party identity provider (IdP).

• User pools provide:

  • Sign-up and sign-in services.

  • A built-in, customizable web UI to sign in users.

  • Social sign-in with Facebook, Google, Login with Amazon, and Sign in with Apple, and through SAML and OIDC identity providers from your user pool.

  • User directory management and user profiles.

  • Security features such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), checks for compromised credentials, account takeover protection, and phone and email verification.

• After successfully authenticating a user, b.

Identity Pools

• With an identity pool, your users can obtain temporary AWS credentials to access AWS services, such as Amazon S3 and DynamoDB.

• Identity pools support anonymous guest users, as well as the following identity providers that you can use to authenticate users for identity pools:

  • Cognito user pools.

  • Social sign-in with Facebook, Google, Login with Amazon, and Sign in with Apple.

  • OpenID Connect (OIDC) providers.

  • SAML identity providers.

  • Developer authenticated identities.

• To save user profile information, your identity pool needs to be integrated with a user pool.

• Cognito identity pools (federated identities) enable you to create unique identities for your users and federate them with identity providers.

Cognito Sync

• Cognito Sync is an AWS service and client library that enables cross-device syncing of application-related user data.

• You can use it to synchronize user profile data across mobile devices and the web without requiring your own backend.

• The client libraries cache data locally so your app can read and write data regardless of device connectivity status.

• Requires Federated Identity Pools; not User Pools.