Amazon Cognito

Summary of Features

• Amazon Cognito provide authentication, authorisation and User Management for mobile and web applications.
• Users can login to Cognito directly or via an external identity provider
• Cognito handles exchange of login credentials for short term AWS credentials using STS.
• Handles merging of multiple identities under a single profile (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc)

Cognito User Pool

Amazon Cognito User Pools is a standards-based Identity Provider and supports identity and access management standards, such as Oauth 2.0, SAML 2.0, and OpenID Connect. A user pool is a group of Cognito or social identities. After login, a JWT (JSON web token) is returned and it is  this token provides identity to access AWS services.

User pools provide:

Cognito Identity Pool

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:

Data Synchronization

Amazon Cognito Sync offers services for synchronization of data across multiple user devices.  You can use it to synchronize user profile data across mobile devices and web applications. The client libraries cache data locally so your app can read and write data regardless of device connectivity status. When the device is online, you can synchronize data, and if you set up push sync, notify other devices immediately that an update is available.