Amazon Cognito

https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/

by moonlighter • 12 years ago

425 157 12 years ago

aws.amazon.com

JTon3• 12 years ago

How did this float to the top of my front page so quickly. Are we all genuinely _that_ interested in new AWS products? or did this post receive some "extra" help

extesy• 12 years ago

This makes Amazon competitors to various backend-as-a-service startups (like Parse), so yes, it's interesting.

JTon3• 12 years ago

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.

danso2• 12 years ago

To answer your first question: Yes. Many of those who work on services are very interested in cloud-based systems, and Amazon happens to be a major leader in this.

Ancillary factors:

1. The title is clickworthy. While link-baity titles do work well on HN (compared to very vague titles)...this title sticks out because it is two words: One of them is "Amazon", which has very immediate connotations and brand recognition. The second is a proper noun. Those of us who haven't heard of "Cognito" are likely to think, immediately, "Whoa, new Amazon product, must click-through to see how it will impact my work". That it is two words also makes it visually distinctive regardless of what those words even are.

2. It's 11AM, which means almost every developer on the East Coast is awake, and West Coast developers, particularly the ones responsible enough to reserve HN viewing for before-work hours, are getting their coffee and checking HN. So, lots of potential upvoters.

bsilvereagle• 12 years ago

Every time someone submits a link, the first posting gets a point. So if 20 people independently posted it to HN before it got to the front page, it would accumulate points pretty quickly without comments.

meshko• 12 years ago

Amazon: "It is so difficult to merge user behavior data across different devices they use... I have an idea! Let's create a service which will do it for "them"!

aashaykumar92• 12 years ago

Damn, these guys are on a streak! 2 great products released in 2 days. This one seems a little more innovative than Zocalo though.

mikecb2• 12 years ago

Sort of like google's cloud endpoints, I suppose: https://developers.google.com/cloud/samples/mbs/ and https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/endpoints/

wiradikusuma• 12 years ago

I would say it's closer to http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/06/cloud-enabli...

mikecb2• 12 years ago

Yeah, I knew there was something else too. All are little code or code-free backend services.

matthewarkin• 12 years ago

So Amazon is now competing with Facebook / Parse?

hodgesmr• 12 years ago

And new iCloud. And new Dropbox API. And Helios.

mkr-hn• 12 years ago

Does Apple consider iCloud a competitor to other cloud services? You need an Apple device to sign up for it, so you can't move to it if you only have access to Android or Windows devices.

yourad_io• 12 years ago

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.

rabc• 12 years ago

It's the same with almost every BaaS. Do you want your data? Pay for it.

That's why I always advocate for building your own backend, if you have a long-run plan and/or expect to generate a lot of data for the app.

mnglkhn2• 12 years ago

The trick with your suggestion of making data more portable is that if Amazon or any other platform provider would do so, then it would create a race to the bottom in terms of price. This would make the business quickly unappealing for the likes of Amazon. This is why no one will make their platform formats portable. At least not while things are in flux and the battle field is still disputed. Once the market matures (see the mobile telephony of 2000s) then you'll be able to port your phone number.

jkarneges• 12 years ago

At Fanout.io (not BaaS like Cognito, but another kind of microservice) we opened everything up to make us easy to migrate off of. Why wait for the market to mature when we can do things the way customers want from the start?

See you at the race to the bottom!

Iftheshoefits2• 12 years ago

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, what makes you think you would be prevented from moving all this to another provider? From the FAQ (https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/faqs/), it seems that Cognito data is stored in a straight-forward Key-Value scheme. That's about as easy as it gets when it comes to data structure.

Moreover, the actual service itself would almost certainly be implemented differently with another provider. Why should Amazon, or anybody else who offers similar "menu of services" cloud computing, make it easy for you to do so (they make money off of you not moving)?

mindcrime• 12 years ago

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.

toomuchtodo• 12 years ago

Presumably a person or company who has chosen to use this service understands the technical limitations and features it entails.

That's a pretty big assumption to make. People, even technical people, make assumptions all the time that they'll be able to get their data out of a system and then aren't able to at a future date.

pbreit• 12 years ago

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.

drewcrawford• 12 years ago

I'm working on this. Email in profile.

centropy• 12 years ago

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.

rbdone• 12 years ago

A couple of open source options that you can deploy to your own servers (or your cloud provider): - Apache UserGrid (incubator project) - DreamFactory - BaaSBox - LoopBack - Helios - Deployd

Any other OSS out there for this?

snom380• 12 years ago

Doesn't CouchBase Mobile Sync Gateway do something similar?

diafygi• 12 years ago

A buzzword used in Cognito and Zocalo is "secure". I'm assuming that means that it's server-side encrypted at rest.

What would be really impressive is if there was an option to client-side encrypt the data before sending it to AWS. Of course, that would mean you'd have to move your syncing logic to the client-side, too, but having a good client-side encryption option would be a real differentiator.

rakoo• 12 years ago

Wild guess: Amazon does nothing to solve sync conflicts, because it's highly correlated with your app business. Amazon gives you all conflicting versions and some flags telling your app "there's a conflict, you should fix it". Much like CouchDB.

So if it works like that, you absolutely can encrypt your payload client-side, and use Cognito as a mere transport.

napoleond• 12 years ago

Much like CouchDB.

Exactly. I don't know why people are so attracted to locked in solutions like Parse or now this when Couch has already been doing it for a long time, and there are mature third-party providers (Cloudant, Iriscouch, etc) that can help you get off the ground just as easily without ever being locked in with them.

cheald• 12 years ago

The Cognito marketing materials claim that it supports "intelligent conflict resolution".

bshimmin• 12 years ago

Much better name than "Zocalo", if nothing else.

bellerocky• 12 years ago

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 be clever and anyone with sense afraid to speak up during the meeting when they come up with these names.

jonknee• 12 years ago

Amazon is a weird name too.

xhroot• 12 years ago

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

danso2• 12 years ago

What cloud service names, off the top of your head, do you consider to be exemplary?

"Parse"? OK, sure...but that's not any more functionally descriptive than "Cognito"...and Parse is a more narrowly focused company with a primary service...In the case of "Cognito" and "Zocalo"..., Amazon has to come up with names that are distinctive because they provide so many core services...so many that even me, an engineer, get them confused. Imagine the difficulty of a fly-by marketing person trying to differentiate between similar sounding names.

Furthermore, these names are distinctive industry wide...presumably, if Zocalo becomes big, you will no longer have to say "AWS Zocalo", but just, "Zocalo"...just like you do with "S3" and "EC2".

To drive home the situation that Amazon is in, let's consider another great product name: Dropbox. Unlike Parse, it is very easy to relate to the core service. But consider the phrase, "Amazon Dropbox"..."Dropbox" is unique compared to the currently named AWS services...but it has a huge collision with Amazon's core service, which is, stocking and shipping products. If Dropbox.com didn't exist, and Amazon used it instead of "Zocalo"...there is a considerable risk that people associate "dropbox" with some kind of packaging thing.

uptown• 12 years ago

Out of their recently-launched services, I liked the name "MatchBook" the most. It was intended to provide cheap or free Kindle versions of books which you'd previously purchased physical versions of. Unfortunately, it's a product that virtually no publishers have adopted.

danneu• 12 years ago

They're unique while remaining loosely related to the products they describe.

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%B3calo is the city center (of Mexico City's historical district), a simple and untaken metaphor for a service that "...provides users with a central location for both the documents and files they are...".

Chronic283• 12 years ago

Great. You are 1 out of 100,000 people that understand the metaphor.

curun1r• 12 years ago

Zocalo, sure...but Cognito makes complete sense. The word incognito basically means anonymous. The prefix 'in-' frequently negates the meaning of the word it's attached to. So when you remove the negation from anonymous, you get a known identity, which seems very apropos to an identity service.

ColinCera3• 12 years ago

Cognito means known, recognized, identified; contrast with incognito. Is that really such a terrible, horrible, no good name for a service that verifies user identities and manages user profile data?

It's a shame Amazon can't afford to hire a marketing genius like you, but I think they're doing the best they can with the idiots they have to work with.

doctorstupid• 12 years ago

But as a user enters cognito, they then become incognito. That does not make sense.

fragsworth• 12 years ago

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, or I'll just have to shut down my own services if I decide it's not worth migrating.

moonlighter2• 12 years ago

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. Similarly, they try to also avoid feature creep by only providing features which customers really ask for.

bradly• 12 years ago

SimpleDB is the closest I believe. It's still around if you are using it, but it isn't in the web console anymore.

riffraff• 12 years ago

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.

nmcfarl• 12 years ago

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 products – for instance the first, (and not a runaway hit) Mechanical Turk is still with us.

mturkisgreat• 12 years ago

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.

todd3834• 12 years ago

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.

yalogin• 12 years ago

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

kumar303• 12 years ago

Yes. Firebase. I think Firebase is interesting because they focus on realtime data which is crucial for a lot of apps these days.

michaelmior2• 12 years ago

There are many startups which do this (or at least similar) already. It's often referred to as "backend as a service" (BaaS). Some links below, but you'll find many more via Google.

http://www.kinvey.com/ https://backendless.com/ https://www.parse.com/ http://www.baasbox.com/

cobrabyte• 12 years ago

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

nni2• 12 years ago

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 :)

orandolabs4• 12 years ago

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.

infocollector• 12 years ago

Does anyone know who made this video?

moonlighter2• 12 years ago

There's more information about AWS Cognito beginning at the 1:03:00 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr6WirGn-6k

Keyframe• 12 years ago

Why would anyone outsource such a thing to another company/service?

KamiCrit• 12 years ago

Did Amazon just change the name of the product that was topping HN yesterday?

pests• 12 years ago

Did you even try reading the link?

xianshou• 12 years ago

So, Amazon Parse? Looks like the big four (Apple, Google, Amazon, FB) all have to ahem...back(end) it up now.

frik• 12 years ago

Big five (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft)

joeframbach• 12 years ago

For those wary of vendor lock-in, or for those wanting a self-hosted similar service: Just yesterday I spun up my own oauth.io oauthd server. It's working out fairly well. It's only third-party authentication, it doesn't handle guest users or local authentication.

amirmc5• 12 years ago

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 application. i.e something like the app-store model but it connects to the user's 'personal cloud' (or the desktops of old - if you prefer). Such a system needs to be FOSS at its core but with a way for developers to get paid for providing value to end-users (who themselves get control of their data/networks).

Of course, this won't happen overnight, but the alternative is that everyone ends up using proprietary silos, with huge lock-in and innovation suffers as the tech giants get distracted with lawsuits.

I'm working with others on the distributed systems infrastructure we need to make this possible [1], so that we can get to a place where everyone can have their own piece of the cloud. In fact, one of the major components of this is Mirage, which has been discussed quite a bit on HN recently [2].

[1] http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020125 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8005130 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726748

michaelmior2• 12 years ago

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 love to be proven wrong and see an implementation that is killer enough to solve these problems.

amirmc5• 12 years ago

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 'independent' - users don't notice that as much and reminds me of FMCG.).

We don't need most users in the beginning. Just those that are technically savvy enough to understand the landscape and the way the world is headed. From there we can develop more stuff and eventually get it into a state ready for the masses. For example, I can run my personal website as a unikernel [1], which is not suitable for mom-and-pop but great for anyone currently using any static site generators. As more libraries get released I can build on that an eventually run more of my infrastructure this way (my prototypical examples are mail, contacts and calendars).

In terms of the friction for developers, we simply have to make the libraries and tooling fun and easy to use. With well-designed systems it's not necessarily any more friction that what developers have to do now (i.e build their own backend).

"All that said, I'd love to be proven wrong and see an implementation that is killer enough to solve these problems."

We're working on it.

[1] http://amirchaudhry.com/from-jekyll-to-unikernel-in-fifty-li...

mynegation• 12 years ago

I do, but, granted, I am a typical HN reader, not a typical user. I want my data either to be encrypted by the key that only I have, before being sent to the online storage service, and/or being sent to the computer that I physically control (NAS at my home).

The reasoning that users do not want to maintain that infrastructure is a very valid one. However, it is like having a car vs. using public transportation. Most car owners do not maintain their car themselves, but at least you can remove your personal items from the trunk before you drive it to the mechanic.

Now the question is does this analogy extends to the advantages of using your own car vs public transportation. My guess is that need for privacy could be one big driver, but the company that can make home computing infrastructure an item of conspicuous consumption will be a big winner. Think Apple or Sonos, but in terms of what comes next (Augmented Reality, Voice HCI etc).

rektide• 12 years ago

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

api2• 12 years ago

The problem isn't that users don't care, but that there's no revenue model. As a result none of these decentralized networking or platform companies can get funding.

Without funding, they don't have the resources to build truly compelling products. You can prototype something in your spare time, but to polish something to be truly competitive outside enthusiast circles you need to dedicate serious time to it.

Even if users did care there is no mechanism for them to pay for it, so it doesn't happen.

ebiester• 12 years ago

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?

rstupek• 12 years ago

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

rschmitty• 12 years ago

A different 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 application.

User Dependency Injection!

CaveTech• 12 years ago

Isn't that what App.net was supposed to be? By most standards that project was a huge failure. It's hard to proposition a user to start managing their own silo.

api2• 12 years ago

App.net was centrally hosted and centrally controlled, so it wasn't really all that different from its competitors. It also had execution issues.

johnchristopher• 12 years ago

Wouldn't Dropbox Apps, even though it isn't open source, be a good start for your requirements ?

tdaltonc• 12 years ago

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/

walterbell3• 12 years ago

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

kentonv• 12 years ago

(Sandstorm author here.)

Based on a brief skim of the Mirage docs, it looks like a really big difference between Mirage and Sandstorm is that Mirage wants apps to be written in OCaml based on a custom API whereas Sandstorm builds of Linux. Any server app that runs on Linux should be easy to port into Sandstorm, but it seems like a lot of things will need to be written from scratch on Mirage.

In fact it appears Mirage intends to replace the kernel entirely. I can certainly see the appeal of dumping legacy baggage, but it's going to take quite a bit of work to reach the point of practicality.

pjkundert• 12 years ago

https://sandstorm.io ?

JPKab• 12 years ago

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

tn13• 12 years ago

Users don't care about. Not worth doing.

oh_sigh• 12 years ago

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

hqm• 12 years ago

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.

tracker1• 12 years ago

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.

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

Interesting. How does this overlap/conflict with efforts like Diaspora or OwnCloud?

rpdillon• 12 years ago

This sounds quite similar to what the (now more-or-less defunct) Singly was trying to accomplish. Having talked to a former employee about it at some length, the TL;DR is that 1) the technology and ideas are cool and 2) uptake was disappointing. That said, execution matters more than ideas when it comes to success.

dksidana2• 12 years ago

I would love to know if there are any open source alternatives to such solution.

knicholes• 12 years ago

How about Riak? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11351866/does-riak-have-a...

dksidana2• 12 years ago

Closet alternative, I have seen till now, is Pouchdb https://github.com/pouchdb/pouchdb

jflowers45• 12 years ago

I'm definitely finding it interesting to see Amazon releasing more and more offerings to make life as a developer easier. Will be interesting to see whether they can leverage some of these services to make developing for the Fire phone extra appealing.

sophacles3• 12 years ago

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 companies already, probably even for the customer's other services.

skram3• 12 years ago

Have you seen Stormpath?

sophacles3• 12 years ago

I have now. Thanks for the pointer!

idea_shot• 12 years ago

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

sophacles3• 12 years ago

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!

kriro• 12 years ago

There's a pretty big market for this/enterprise level identity management in general. At least in Germany, companies usually prefer inhous/more control over hosted solutions though (especially in the light of the last 1+ year). SAP IdM is the big dog here (it's somewhat messy though since SAP bought the technology and it shows that it's somewhat of a hodgepodge imo) and the only one I've worked with. I'm sure all the big ERP companies provide this in some way.

Not really the API you're looking for but I thought it was worth mentioning.

cobralibre• 12 years ago

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

skram3• 12 years ago

Am I missing something or could this be useful for non-mobile applications as well like HTML/JS apps if they provided an API outside of the iOS/Android SDKs?

athrun• 12 years ago

You're right. And considering they have just added Cognito support to their Node.js SDK, we can suppose this is the master plan. http://aws.amazon.com/releasenotes/JavaScript/99205414836272...

skram3• 12 years ago

Thanks for the link!

ColinCera3• 12 years ago

It says on the page they provide a web service API accessible to any application.

mey• 12 years ago

Looking into the service, the identify providers they support are Amazon (naturally), Google and Facebook.

mamcx• 12 years ago

Anything like this but for relational data? I need to sync a sqlite database and my attemps of using this kind of service show me are not really a good fit.

orandolabs4• 12 years ago

EnduroSync (https://orandolabs.com) will get you close. It's a light weight object store that sits on top of sqlite.

dperfect3• 12 years ago

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 time you want to allow users to interact with each other (or provide rules for how their resources interact with the world outside their little "user bubble"), you need business logic that resides somewhere other than the app; otherwise, your business logic (which may affect more than just the authenticated user) is in an untrusted environment. Not only that, but there are huge scalability problems associated with using a logic-less backend storage model if you want to do anything that involves more than just a single user's data.

Even for games, something as simple as providing a leaderboard is impossible (or extremely impractical) with this model. If you have no server-side logic to perform aggregate operations over multiple users, the only other option you'd have is to basically grab all the data and perform those operation in your app, which is absurd.

Backend development, server management, and deployment can be hard (though many PaaS solutions are making it easier than ever), but personally I'd never recommend building an app with a logic-less backend data store like this. Even if you don't think you'll need it today, in most cases you're going to need logic on the backend eventually. If you've started with this, you're just creating a lot more work for yourself when you finally do need to implement a feature that crosses the line from isolated-users-only to users-that-can-interact (or even just obtaining aggregate user data for business intelligence purposes).

300bps• 12 years ago

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.

dperfect3• 12 years ago

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).

chaz2• 12 years ago

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.

dperfect3• 12 years ago

Parse's solution is a great start as you say, but I can see myself running into the limits of that approach fairly quickly.

And, as you say, if these solutions mature, we might have some very powerful stuff in this space in a few years... maybe almost as powerful as just having your own server-side code running on some backend servers ;) But at that point, we're right back to where we are with traditional/custom backend systems being run on cloud server providers (which is not a bad thing!).

It just kind of feels like we're trying to re:Invent the wheel. You can offer these kinds of "a la carte" services all day long, and they're nice (on the surface) as long as they play nicely with each other in an open ecosystem - e.g., "let's grab this identity provider, that storage solution, this analytics engine, etc." It might look similar to Heroku's "add-ons", but with components that perform more specific functions. I just don't see that openness coming from Amazon, Google, etc. as they will all want to lock people into their services (which is understandable from a business standpoint). And unfortunately, anyone who buys into partial (and proprietary) solutions in the meantime are - in my opinion - just shooting themselves in the foot by limiting the use of their data.

Even in a perfect world with a vast marketplace of plug-and-play, interoperable cloud components, I would ask: is the "soul" of your app's code really captured in a conglomeration of components like this? If you have a need for a backend with custom logic of any kind, I think you're probably doing something unique (hopefully anyway). If you're going to need some real, unique business logic that can't be offered as an abstract cloud component, then I strongly suspect you're going to want more control over all of the backend. Even Parse's approach ends up looking more and more like a traditional custom backend system as you add more power to the "Cloud Code" approach.

As a programmer, you can often find libraries and drop-in components that accomplish 80% of what you need, so you write some custom code to "glue" those components together. That custom code usually contains business logic that really couldn't be abstracted or offered as a drop-in component. Where does that custom code live in the "perfect" ecosystem of plug-and-play cloud server components? How do you control the thing which makes your app/backend business logic unique? I don't think it's going to be in the client/mobile app as some people tend to think.

Maybe there's a good solution that combines these kinds of components with custom (and flexible) server-side code - I just haven't seen what it looks like yet. If I tried to use this stuff today, I'd be kicking myself tomorrow as I figure out that it's a pain to juggle data between components that I don't control and components that I do control.

GregorStocks• 12 years ago

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.

akrymski• 12 years ago

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).

Chronic283• 12 years ago

There was no need for you to mention your company's name.

SimianLogic2• 12 years ago

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?

nni2• 12 years ago

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...

ColinCera3• 12 years ago

I think Amazon's pricing example is based on a fairly unrealistic use case where you only sync at the end of a session. With real world applications, most of them sync multiple times during a session, e.g., every 5 minutes, every 30 minutes, every time a significant atom of work is done (e.g., Gmail saving drafts). With mobile devices it's common to turn them off abruptly, or lose connectivity abruptly. A user's not going to enjoy the experience if nothing they did in their session on their phone is available when they fire up their laptop because the phone app only syncs at the end of a session.

donavanm• 12 years ago

Or lets say thats about $12,000 a year. Very conservatively thats 1/10th of a developers cost. Could you really build, and operate, a truly equivalent service with 1/10th of a developer? Im dubious.

There are many cost/efficiency arguments against outsourcing infrastructure. I dont think this is one of them.

tim333• 12 years ago

Yeah - I think Parse is much cheaper

glynjackson• 12 years ago

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.

Paul_Dessert• 12 years ago

Agreed. I'm confused. I don't understand how this helps users access data on "any" device.

The data pulled from the backed is handed off to the front end. The front end determines what's displayed and how it's displayed based off of the device. What does data storage have to do anything.

tomschlick• 12 years ago

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.

dave1619• 12 years ago

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.

haberman• 12 years ago

When I see products like this, my first question is: could you write an free, open-source app with this without having to shell out your personal money to make it happen?

For Amazon Cognito, the answer appears to be "yes, until all of your users together store more than 10GB". ie. until your app gets popular.

So for free open-source apps, I think I'd prefer to stick with Dropbox or Google Drive, where the billing is associated with an account the user already has (which most users can operate entirely within the free tier). That way you don't run into a situation where you are a victim of your own success, by exceeding a free tier that applies to the sum of all user data in your app.

nostromo• 12 years ago

Amazon seems to be in "me too" mode lately. They released an Android phone, a Dropbox clone, and now a Parse clone.

Instead being the vanguard of innovation, they're letting other companies validate the need for a service before swooping in.

Who's next? Probably Stripe.

eclipxe• 12 years ago

https://payments.amazon.com/home

newobj• 12 years ago

Amazon Payments launched in 2007, and Stripe lunched publicly in 20011.

orandolabs4• 12 years ago

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?

aendruk• 12 years ago

My impression is that the interest here is not in the product itself, but in the insight that it lends about a known player.

tw007kiid• 12 years ago

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=UR0qsHWl9aM

joshdance• 12 years ago

Amazon and their ambition has no bounds. They really are the grizzly bear in the room of online services.

donniezazen• 12 years ago

Would you guys trust Amazon data services like EC2/S3 for backing up your system which includes all your GPG/SSH keys, photos, important documents like tax returns, etc.?

orandolabs4• 12 years ago

In response to this announcement, Orando Labs (https://orandolabs.com) has decided to offer EnduroSync and Identio with open source licenses and as paid AMI instances. We believe we have a unique solution to some difficult problems (identity and syncing), and want to see our solutions widely adopted. Read more at http://orandolabs.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/amazon-cognito

Amazon Cognito

Related Stories