5 ms·

I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again

• AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
  Nobody is ever going to convince me AWS isn’t hostile to users as a filter Like how scammers put in typos
  • _3u10 2mo ago
    It’s not for users it’s for people who think 1/4 of the traffic a raspberry pi could handle is scale. Or don’t know what a server is.
    • the8472 2mo ago
      ... or those who don't know about constant-time functions, the difference between sha1 and argon2, etc. etc. I had to fix such things several times in corporate internet-facing systems. A generalist engineer can do this just fine, if they're aware of the state of the art, but there's nothing ensuring that they actually do. The compliance tickboxes were of no help here either.
• _3u10 2mo ago
  Just use whatever service that costs 10x as much to make it do what it was advertised to do in the first place, like DAX for dynamo or cloudfront for S3 in case you hit “scale” like 2000 req/sec
• pelagicAustral 2mo ago
  AWS documentation is the best excuse to stay away from their services. I thank everyday for their documents, it's like putting a lighthouse on an iceberg.
• turboturbo 2mo ago
  This reads like, and is confirmed by Pangram to be, 100% AI slop
  • justinluther 2mo ago
    "That’s not an upgrade. That’s a hostage situation."
    • chasd00 2mo ago
      hah that quote makes my day.
  • axus 2mo ago
    At least it's formatted readably and they took the time to ask the AI to make it less AI-like. The tone is annoying but I try to focus on the message and not how it's communicated. You'd think making AI do the annoying integration work would mean less complaints about terrible docs and API.
• wilkystyle 2mo ago
  > Reading Cognito docs feels like someone took three separate manuals, threw them in a blender, and then sprinkled in some outdated Stack Overflow answers for flavor. This is my experience with basically all of AWS documentation. It is nearly always either (1) far too high-level to be of any actual use, or (2) far too verbose, with a massive volume of superfluous information I need to parse and discard before I get to the stuff I am trying to figure out. As just one example, I recently needed to link an AWS Partner Central account with an AWS Management account, and process and documentation was painfully complicated: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/partner-central/latest/getting-started/account-linking.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/partner-central/latest/getting-s...
  • deleted 2mo ago
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  • infecto 2mo ago
    That’s my experience with any of the 3 hyperscalers when reading docs. Millions of versions, blog posts and just overall massive challenge to get to the root of it. Funny the one thing I was always able to immediately and quickly digest, AWS Textract because they have a great python library with the kind of documentation I expect from a python project.
    • automatic6131 2mo ago
      Documentation clearly following Conway's law: shipping the org chart.
    • disgruntledphd2 2mo ago
      > That’s my experience with any of the 3 hyperscalers when reading docs. I used to hate the AWS docs, now I use Azure and I hate that so much more. At least AWS had loads of (bad) docs that you could string together to figure out how to do something. With Azure, there's just no docs (except for bad videos), and they literally tell you (at the top of every page) that you can do this with AI (I know I can do it with AI, but I'd prefer if I could read your docs to make sure the machine isn't doing something dumb). My expectation is that I'll end up on GCP in a few years, and that will be bad in hilariously different ways.
• samdixon 2mo ago
  Regardless of AI gen'd article... Cognito does have some rough edges. One day I'd like to make a best practices Cloudformation template (if doesn't already exist) that includes things like which login name to set, notification lambdas and the like. One big pro about cognito.. can't beat the price.
  • arpinum 2mo ago
    They added new enterprise features, free ride is over if you want any improvements made to the service in the last 8 years.
• mikigraf 2mo ago
  Don't even get me started on backups or other basic functionality one would expect from a service like this. AWS should either make an acquisition (Auth0 or a smaller company like Wristband?) and rebuild the service, or just kill it. Instead, we have a critical service that enterprises rely on stuck in limbo...
  • tietjens 2mo ago
    Auth0 already was acquired.
• patwolf 2mo ago
  My experience with Cognito matches the author's experience exactly. I mostly used Auth0 in the past, but we switched to Cognito for a new project because it would be cheaper. Don't like that email addresses are case sensitive, and now you want to change that? Sorry, you gotta create a new user pool from scratch--no way to migrate.
  • oofbey 2mo ago
    That’s really the worst feature of it. When you first set it up you’re asked at least a dozen questions that you probably have no idea what they mean. But you have to pick something. And whatever you pick on that first day setup you are stuck with FOREVER. Unless you do a complex data migration task. Also, want to migrate to a different provider? Sorry. You can’t get the hashed passwords out. So if you do a migration it will be painful to users since they’ll have to do a password reset. Yes it’s cheap. But you get what you pay for.
    • vinckr 2mo ago
      Ory Kratos has a password migration hook that lets you migrate password credentials out of anything (including Cognito) without password resets. I believe most other (modern) auth vendors have an equivalent. I really don't see any reason to be using Cognito in $currentyear. Disclosure: working for Ory.
      • zdragnar 2mo ago
        Auth0 will run an export for you, but you have to file a support ticket for them to do it, and it may take them a bit of time, so you may end up with some users who get reset to a slightly old password (if they change it between the export and your import) or if you get a new registration. Given all the pain I've suffered working with both cognito and auth0, I can't imagine a reason for using either in $currentyear.
        • jenius 2mo ago
          Yea I went through this as well - when I tested it, they also required you be on a paid plan to even be able to get the export, which is kinda crazy. I work at an auth company now (Clerk) and this experience drove our current approach, which is that you can instantly export all your user data through a button in the dashboard. Maybe it's not as "sticky", but I think respecting your users when they want to get their data or migrate off is way more important.
• opengrass 2mo ago
  LDAP, or... Linux/BSD as the identity/runtime layer, SSH is the protocol boundary, and your web backend is the command gateway.
• solatic 2mo ago
  > Next time, I’m picking a tool based on developer experience first, not AWS service integration convenience. The time we lost debugging Cognito issues could have paid for several years of a paid auth provider. How many paid auth providers let you export user password hashes so that you can seamlessly migrate to another vendor, if you want to? The whole problem with auth is that both (a) login screens are shown to unauthenticated users, which is a superset that includes attackers, who will do everything from DDoS to crafted malicious input to try to grab user secrets, so you really want to pick something that is already running at large production scale and with all the production battle-scars, and (b) that need to go with a managed vendor is very much in tension against local development, vendor independence, data portability, and other Good Engineering Practices (TM). Sure, AWS Cognito sucks. In many ways, the product feels stuck. Making compromises to get stuff shipped, working, and stable sucks. But honestly, unless you're going to prefer (b) over (a) (and there are times to do so, in particular with intranet applications behind a firewall that aren't really susceptble to those kinds of attacks) and pick something like Keycloak, you could do a lot worse than Cognito (shudder, Okta, shudder).
  • goosejuice 2mo ago
    Ory let's you do this I believe.
    • vinckr 2mo ago
      Yup for the Ory managed service (Ory Network) you can export all data through the admin API including hashed passwords. Of course when self-hosting Ory you have full control over the database as well. Disclosure: working for Ory.
  • leetrout 2mo ago
    Counter point: How many paid auth providers force you to create an entirely new deployment and then use a lambda to migrate within their own system? Especially for something as seemingly simple like adding another metadata field? I think they allow export because they drew some interesting lines around their own mutability concerns. I also would never use cognito again. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/cognito-user-pool-updating.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/co...
• badrequest 2mo ago
  IMHO not rolling your own auth is asking for stuff like this to happen.
  • lazyant 2mo ago
    I believe the opposite of this statement to be true
  • vips7L 2mo ago
    This is a terrible suggestion. Rolling your own auth nowadays is like rolling your own encryption. It’s just a bad idea. OAuth and OIDC are massive specs that are constantly changing and you’re going to be stuck chasing and developing auth instead of your actual product. I know because this is what my brain dead principal engineer did and I’ve spent the last 3 years chasing RFCs and am now going to spend the next year migrating to Keycloak because I’ve finally convinced my boss that we’re not an auth company.
    • joshstrange 2mo ago
      I agree you shouldn't write every line by hand, you should use libraries, but pretending like OAuth/ODIC require using something like Cognito/Auto0 is just silly. An LLM can crank out the needed code in very little time and give you full control over your auth instead of fighting an auth provider at every turn. The number of compromises something like Cognito requires are just not worth the perceived gains.
      • vips7L 2mo ago
        I really whole heartedly disagree and if you think it’s silly I think that you don’t really fully understand the complexity of it. An LLM doesn’t solve everything. You still need to understand the spec, become a domain expert, and design your solution for the parts that the RFCs leave open with undefined behaviour. At the very least if this is your opinion you should start with an open source solution like Keycloak or authentic and fork it if you really need “control”.
• duttish 2mo ago
  I built a product on Cognito in 2017-18 or when it was, and already back then it felt semi-abandonded. Thankfully that particular product never really took off and we didn't have to spend too much time on wrangling Cognito.
• throwaway613746 2mo ago
  [dead]
• hirako2000 2mo ago
  AWS is mental health hazard, has been for many years.
• klodolph 2mo ago
  Feels like there are a few categories of services from cloud providers, There’s the basic infrastructure we know and love like S3, EC2, etc. There’s the higher level but still basic stuff that just makes a lot of sense. I like ECS + Fargate, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS. And then there are the tarpits. CloudFormation. Cognito. Step Functions. API Gateway. They do something useful (otherwise why would they exist?) but the main point of their existence seems to be to trap you in AWS, and the fact that they solve a problem seems secondary. Some of them are cheap (CloudFormation is free!) but in general they seem like expensive alternatives to simpler, cheaper solutions.
  • icedchai 2mo ago
    I caution against using DynamoDB when just starting out. It’s too easy to paint yourself into a corner.
  • roryirvine 2mo ago
    The further up the stack you go, the worse it gets - but, honestly, Cognito and API Gateway are no worse than mid-tier. The really nightmarish ones are the likes of CodeStar, AppRunner, Directory Service, CodeCatalyst, and 90% of anything under the Systems Manager heading. Things that tend to be glued together from multiple lower-level services with a sprinkling of vendor lock-in on top.
    • icedchai 2mo ago
      I found "Systems Manager Session Manager" (terrible name!) useful a few times for getting around network restrictions. You set up a EC2 VM, which doesn't have to be in a public subnet, then use "session manager" to forward ports to other instances / services using the AWS CLI. It is possible for that stuff to be blocked with IAM but often it's overlooked since IAM is confusing enough as it is.
• jprokay13 2mo ago
  I’ve been pondering a deep dive into Keycloak or Ory. Or is WorkOS good enough for the price? I’m looking to centralize account management across multiple systems.
  • adithyareddy 2mo ago
    WorkOS is incredible, even if you don't need any of the "enterprise" features and you're building an entirely B2C app.
  • NegativeLatency 2mo ago
    Used all 3, I would go with Ory.
    • vinckr 2mo ago
      Just out of interest, what makes you choose Ory over Keycloak/WorkOs?
      • NegativeLatency 2mo ago
        Keycloak is a big complex java app that does everything in one service, clustering and everything, all kinds of plugins and stuff you can make it do what you want at a price. WorkOS has messed up SCIM integrations for us/our customers serveral times, and now with agentic stuff I'd just build out SCIM support myself (done it pre agents so maybe not for everyone), they're also kinda expensive and have hard lockin since they're not going to hand out your customer SAML/SCIM/whatever configs and password hashes. Ory's got a nice cloud offering (only used it self hosted) but the whole stack is there and it's IMO easier to understand than keycloak (and you probably don't want to build your own) I would also rather admin/bug fix/operate a go service than a java service (personally). Keycloak is not terrible though you have enough rope to really get yourself in a bind.
  • sceptic123 2mo ago
    We've been using Keycloak for a while, it's definitely not bad, but there are times when it's been frustrating, and getting it both stable and scalable seem to be incompatible goals. It's super powerful and can do whatever you want it to do (at least if you are comfortable writing Java SPI). But there's a lot of knowledge of how to set things up that takes time and is not readily acquired. For the record we looked at Ory early on, but it was not mature enough and didn't offer a full IdP stack at the time. We've since looked again and found there to be some conventions around how it works that made it hard for us to consider migrating from Keycloak.
• andrewstuart 2mo ago
  Why use any AWS for a startup? Why use AWS for any size company?
• DerDerDaIst 2mo ago
  I had the same learnings with cognito when using it for a product we built. We mainly choose it because AWS was used anyway and the security aspect seemed to be solved entierly with this coice (if aws get's hacked ... ). We regretted it out of similar reasons.
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• etothepii 2mo ago
  I share the OP's pain we chose to use cognito for the exact same reason and I've had the exact same pain however the evaluation of itself takes time and the inconvenience OP is suffering with is only a function of having users. If I were starting my startup again I would, in almost every instance, trade problems if we have some success for reduced decision fatigue at the start.
• rafaelmn 2mo ago
  One greenfield project I worked on our AWS rep specifically told us to avoid Cognito and go towards auth0 or whatever else. On another project people didn't get this advice and we spent a two weeks working around the limitations to scrap it eventually.
• skeeter2020 2mo ago
  >> and even rawdogged a custom JWT system ... This may now mean something along the lines of "struggling to grind through..." but is based on the original meaning of having sex without a condom, typically with misogynist overtones. You might want to avoid it for this style of writing and audience.
  • aeve890 2mo ago
    The article it's written by Reddit trained AI what do you expect?
  • coredog64 2mo ago
    "sucks" was originally a homophobic pejorative. Languages evolve, sometimes very rapidly.
    • ad_fontes 2mo ago
      Not really. The term is a shortened version of "sucks eggs", which is originally from Shakespeare and used to describe an odious creature or habit (a weasel in Shakespeare's case).
  • snapcaster 2mo ago
    do you realize this is really annoying and don't care or actually think you're being helpful?
• TSiege 2mo ago
  I've used AWS Cognito for two start ups. One is still trucking. Cognito definitely leaves a lot to be desired, but overall I've never encountered any major issues with it. I think it's cheap precisely bc it's lackluster, but that's fine for my needs. YMMV I guess
• demibabs 2mo ago
  > That’s not an upgrade. That’s a hostage situation.
  • aaronharnly 2mo ago
    yeppppppp. Pangram says: 100% AI. Why do we even bother.
    • panny 2mo ago
      Hey, I thought "rawdogging" sounded pretty authentic. Does claude say rawdogging now too?
• lordmoma 2mo ago
  cannot believe in the age of AI, they still couldn't fix the docs issue.
• nkotov 2mo ago
  Friends don't let friends use AWS Cognito.
• Schlagbohrer 2mo ago
  This is so weird because AI should be good at updating the docs. And yet, I often think this about things which still suck even though AI is good at them. Like why is Siri so bad still. Why do so many basic things in windows 11 not work, like folder search? Why does Altium or anything by Xilinx always have outdated docs that refer to menus that dont exist anymore?
  • phoenixy1 2mo ago
    AI actually is decently good at updating docs. But the kinds of problems that are being described in this thread, like documentation that varies wildly in tone and target audience or that describes different versions of the same service, or where how to do something is covered across multiple semi-overlapping pieces of documentation (some of which are up to date and some of which are not) are all a real strong indicator of inadequate centralized ownership of the docs. And the AI ain't gonna update the docs if nobody tells it to. (And AI still requires a great deal of micro-management to be used effectively in docs authorship.)
• jgbuddy 2mo ago
  Yeah good example of this also with the agent stuff they are pushing now, documentation can read to be sales-like and then as you start using it stuff starts to fall apart. At this point there are better open source alternatives (self-hosting) for pretty much anything not requiring specialized hardware
• deleted 2mo ago
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• joshstrange 2mo ago
  In a previous greenfield project (pre-LLM) I considered using Cognito since I was all-in on AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, ApiG, Route53, S3, SQS/SNS, and the list goes on...) but after reading through the docs I wanted to pull my hair out. What I thought was going to be a time-saving measure turned into a quagmire. Even with my level of "lock in" I was not willing to hand over auth and so I rolled my own (and it worked fine). Nowadays I can't imagine using a 3rd-party for something like auth (or many other things) due to lock-in and also just always needing to conform to their way of doing things. Apologies for the non-sequitur but 2 days ago I saw FreshDesk had deleted my account (free plan) that I had been using (sparingly, <50 tickets total if I had to guess) for 3+ years. No email, no notice, just deleted my account and broke the sites that I had integrated their feedback widget into. I reached out to see what was going on and they pretty much told me I had to upgrade if I wanted my account back. Now 1-2 years ago I would have considered paying. In fact I would have considered paying IF they had contacted me to say "pay up or we will delete" but the fact they deleted it without any contact meant FreshDesk was dead to me. I started, for all of 1 minute, to consider the alternatives before I fired up Claude and in <2hrs I had a full replacement for all the parts of FreshDesk I was using (basic ticketing, emails, statuses, file upload). The build-vs-buy decision has completely flipped for me. I have a hard time thinking of paying for something my platform depends on, especially auth, when it's so easy to build it now. Side Note: that "all-in" AWS project? Yeah, with Claude's help I'm off 90% of the AWS's services and while it's still hosted there I can move to any VPS if I want now that I've removed my dependencies on AWS-specific concepts. It's been glorious and it has the side effect of meaning my local dev more-closely matches the deployed code since there isn't AWS-magic I have to fake anymore.
  • ad_fontes 2mo ago
    Auth is a bit of a different beast when it comes to the build vs buy debate though. A competent auth provider has the infrastructure (and necessary data) to deflect against DDoS attacks, bots, etc.
• mikert89 2mo ago
  AWS is good at operations, i.e. running something like S3 at massive scale. Or SQS, ddb, etc. High surface area for distributed systems, but low surface area for user experience. Once you add in product decision making, like how to make the dev experience good on something with alot of user flows (like cognito), the products are shit.
• dabinat 2mo ago
  Personally I would never build my business on a technology tied to a specific vendor that makes it difficult to switch if said vendor delivers a poor service or massively raises the price.
  • jjice 2mo ago
    When evaluating a third-party service like Cognito in this case or a mail provider, I either require that it uses an open standard for access like SMTP or the interface that I need to use is small enough that I can wrap it in my own layer of indirection so I can easily mock it and swap it out later. Most of the time I never switch it. But god damn, does it feel good to know that I can move if I need to and I'm not locked in.
• bklosky 2mo ago
  how are these claude written blogs consistently making front page?
  • root-parent 2mo ago
    Most readers are agents, and they upvote their fellow countryman....
  • Eiriksmal 2mo ago
    I noticed this week that the menu button on LinkedIn posts now lets you choose "Seems like AI slop" as an option. How bold of them to call it what it is... Hacker News is ready for something besides "flag," because it's very frustrating to have so much LLM-generated noise clogging up /classic. Yes, Cognito is a mess. But why can't you write about it in your own voice? Hope the clicks and SEO juice was worth insulting your readers' limited time, Josh Karamuth.
  • DarmokTanagra 2mo ago
    HN users are just as susceptible to slop as anyone else, despite their belief that they are smarter than the average Redditor.
• AznHisoka 2mo ago
  For those that don't use AWS Cognito, what's the next best alternative these days? (Don't say Auth0 either)
  • ad_fontes 2mo ago
    Asking as someone who's only every rolled his own or used Cognito: What's the problem with Auth0?
  • vips7L 2mo ago
    Big fan of Keycloak personally, but I'm also deep in the Quarkus/JVM ecosystem and Quarkus makes deving against Keycloak extremely easy.
  • shimms 2mo ago
    Ory stack has been working very well for us.
• igkougkousis 2mo ago
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• mannyv 2mo ago
  I remember talking to the Cognito team about password reset and arguing with them that being able to set a password was a required feature. They were like "no, why would you never have to not go through the reset flow? That's a security problem." Then of course they added it in a few weeks later because every admin needs to do that. So at some point they had a bunch of people working on it who had like zero operational experience. Two benefits to Cognito are (1) it allows you to log into a service without having any credentials locally, and (2) that Cognito identity allows you to provide access to AWS resources. You can probably do that now, but plenty of solutions still require an on-device key...which is an obvious security issue. Also, using your own backend for authentication made it easier to manage things because your auth wasn't trapped inside Cognito.
• dkobia 2mo ago
  I both hate and love Cognito. Hate it for its unnecessary complexity, love it for providing auth at bargain bin prices. I review Auth0 contracts frequently and that is daylight robbery/extortion, a poster child for vendor-lock-in. I had hopes for clerk.dev, but unfortunately the auth business optimizes for deep lock-in + steadily escalating prices. After working through a few transitions to/from Auth0 that is something I never ever want to do again at scale.
• cldcntrl 2mo ago
  Cognito has real rough edges, this article doesn't really mention any of them. If you've ever tried to implement, say, a working SAML integration through Cognito, you'll know how obscure the flow is. I've had to work with the Cognito team to get real showstopping bugs fixed. Definitely not AWS's most polished service, but workable if you know the ins and outs.
• montroser 2mo ago
  I did some work for a sizable org who were pursuing a migration from their in-house auth to cognito. They originally scoped it at two months, and it ended up taking them six to roll it out. Then they figured out that their cost projection was actually off by an order of magnitude. And also kept getting bitten by peripheral systems newly getting out of sync. And so then, they embarked upon the journey to roll it all back...
• Arainach 2mo ago
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• codegeek 2mo ago
  I am going to be that guy. 8/10 times, you don't need these 3rd party providers. Yes, someone is going to tell me all about the SSOs, SCIMs, Audit Logs etc etc but the point is that 8/10 applications are simple enough to build their own Auth. The rest, go for these services. I never understood the appeal of these 3rd party providers who can hold you hostage just for your users to login ? In 2026 ? I don't get it. May be I am dumb.
  • DarmokTanagra 2mo ago
    I agree, even if you don't want to roll your own Keycloak is good enough for just about everyone.
    • codegeek 2mo ago
      I like Keycloak a lot but didn't select them because I cannot use my own frontend framework.
      • DarmokTanagra 2mo ago
        You should take a look at their client adapters, thats what I use. https://www.keycloak.org/securing-apps/javascript-adapter https://www.keycloak.org/securing-apps/javascript-adapter
• mococa 2mo ago
  Why not keycloak?
• DarmokTanagra 2mo ago
  Keycloak and Ory are the only providers I would actually endorse, and I've used just about all of them. Cognito is a pain, but it mostly works once you get through their horrible docs. Auth0 is a vendor locked PoS with a very aggressive sales team.
  • antonvs 2mo ago
    Could you expand on why Auth0 is a PoS? I've never really liked it, but auth is not my area. Of course, our company uses it...
    • DarmokTanagra 2mo ago
      Lots of really thorny gotcha's relating to their proprietary triggers that aren't documented anywhere. You will end up having to talk to their devs and inevitably get answers that are some flavor of "pay for enterprise, but you can't test to see if it actually solves your problem". It can also be very expensive and messy to setup developer environments since there is not self-hosted option. I haven't used it in a professional setting since the Okta acquisition, but I can't imagine it has gotten any better.
• dublin 2mo ago
  I used to be an architect with a bag of pro certifications for the world's largest AWS services provider/developer/reseller (we even did a lot of work for Amazon.com themselves). I gave it up a few years ago when it became clear that for most people, moving OUT of the cloud was a far better move than moving IN. In a lot of ways, I really love AWS, but most of the high-value services are increasingly flaky and questionably supported, and nearly all of them have (often not very obvious) lock-in barbs. For a while, cloud native development actually made sense. But as Cloud services have converged to become just big Kubernetes providers with API sprinkles (whose syntax is often more vinegary than sugary), there is less and less value there. Add to that that almost no companies really need a huge cloud-based system to run their businesses, and that $500-2500 computers literally outstrip the performance of supercomputers from around the turn of the century in every respect, and there is less and less real need for cloud services...
• dzonga 2mo ago
  for Auth - why don't people go with trusted solutions that work without hiccups. if you want hosted setups - FusionAuth, Stytch etc. if you work in a mainstream language/framework - some excellent libraries eg in ruby authentication-zero, in js - BetterAuth, Django-all-auth. for AWS as well - use their solutions where you don't need to read a lot of docs.
• nater5000 2mo ago
  I don't disagree that AWS Cognito isn't the easiest auth service to work with, but once you figure it out, it works just as well as the others. I've experienced the same exact pains (and many more) that the author described. But the thing is that once you've experienced those pains, you know how to deal with them. In software, you just have to figure it out once and then it's done. I can't say I scaled Cognito usage to anything massive, but I can say that keeping everything in AWS is worth the hassle (at least depending on the context). Cognito provides plenty of options of actual customization (the hosted UI is only good for initial testing, then toss it). And, of course, LLMs are able to deal with Cognito just as easily as any other auth service. I didn't have the luxury of using LLMs when I set up Cognito, but it's still my go-to for auth and Claude doesn't stumble on it.
• vladigtr 2mo ago
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• cactacea 2mo ago
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• jonathaneunice 2mo ago
  The documentation complaint is true of many, maybe all, AWS services: they discuss multiple generations, address multiple target audiences, and range wildly in currency and relevance, from marketing material to technical deep dives, all intermixed. Cognito itself is a very AWS tradeoff. It's delightfully inexpensive. It quite effectively protects one of the most relentlessly attacked parts of any web service. It supports workflows essential as you scale, like SAML federation ("single sign on/SSO"). It basically works, day in and day out. But OMG, the sharp edges! It has sharp edges to spare, even compared to other AWS services, for which sharp edges and exposed corners are just par for the course. Then you try to go the next step, e.g. add multi-region disaster recovery and failover. That seemingly straightforward requirement to scale up is "left as an exercise for the reader." Cognito has all the virtues of a utility service, including the developer experience.
• jatins 2mo ago
  The thing is beyond like top 10 AWS services(ec2, s3, sqs, aurora and few more) this is how most of AWS is. It’s just stuff thrown at the wall to see if it sticks. I wouldn’t be surprised if median AWS service does less than 100k in annual revenue
• sreekanth850 2mo ago
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• blunderous 2mo ago
  I'll be sad when AI gets advanced enough that we can't immediately detect it in writing. For now the slop remains pretty easy to spot.
  • general1465 2mo ago
    If you can't tell, does it matter?
  • DarmokTanagra 2mo ago
    just swear and use slurs, that way we know you are human
• tky 2mo ago
  Most AWS docs are over-engineered marketing designed to get you to pull in 8 other billable services just to use the one you wanted in the first place. Knowing how to decipher their docs and navigate support is a resume-worthy skill.
• raffraffraff 2mo ago
  I hated the idea of self hosting keycloak, learning how to terraform every single inch of it. But I worked at a startup that had a fucking weird investor who paid me, and would pay AWS, but wouldn't pay Okta (or any other 3rd party). So given the choice between Cognito (easy right? It's a managed service!) and Keycloak (a large, complex security Swiss Army knife) should have been a no-brainer in favour of Cognito. But we absolutely hated it. I think it's one of the worst AWS services I've used. Keycloak is only hard because security is hard. The terraform provider is amazing, worked remarkably well. We never had a single hitch, and I could spin up new tenants in seconds, or deploy Keycloak to other regions in a few minutes. Personally, I just hate the idea of running that type of thing in production unless it's my full time job (and it wasn't) and I have other team members who also knowit backwards. But for a sufficiently well staffed org that feels like moving this expertise inhouse and dumping a paid auth service, Keycloak really is amazingly good. Now that I've moved on to another job, my time spent in the belly of Keycloak wasn't wasted either. I can help our security team figure out auth issues blindfolded (ie: without access to their Okta admin interface, and in fact having never seen one)