13 ms·

Amazon Cognito

425 points by moonlighter 12y ago

JTon 12y 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 12y ago
  This makes Amazon competitors to various backend-as-a-service startups (like Parse), so yes, it's interesting.
  - JTon 12y 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.
    - plorkyeran 12y ago
      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.
      - JTon 12y ago
        Ah, I didn't know about the duplicate URL rule. That makes more sense. I've been here for quite a while and I haven't noticed such an aggressive advance before. So it triggered an alarm. Maybe I'll start seeing it more often
- danso 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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"!
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aashaykumar92 12y 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.
mikecb 12y ago
Sort of like google's cloud endpoints, I suppose: https://developers.google.com/cloud/samples/mbs/ https://developers.google.com/cloud/samples/mbs/ and https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/endpoints/ https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/endpoints/
- wiradikusuma 12y ago
  I would say it's closer to http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/06/cloud-enabling-your-mobile-app.html http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/06/cloud-enabli...
  - mikecb 12y ago
    Yeah, I knew there was something else too. All are little code or code-free backend services.
matthewarkin 12y ago
So Amazon is now competing with Facebook / Parse?
- hodgesmr 12y ago
  And new iCloud. And new Dropbox API. And Helios.
  - mkr-hn 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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!
- Iftheshoefits 12y 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/ 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)?
diafygi 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
    The Cognito marketing materials claim that it supports "intelligent conflict resolution".
bshimmin 12y ago
Much better name than "Zocalo", if nothing else.
bellerocky 12y 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 12y ago
  Amazon is a weird name too.
  - xhroot 12y ago
    As were the originally proposed names "Cadabra" and "Relentless" (http://www.relentless.com http://www.relentless.com still redirects to Amazon).
- danso 12y 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.
fragsworth 12y 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.
- moonlighter 12y 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 12y 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.
    - deleted 12y ago
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  - riffraff 12y 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.
    - 12y ago
yalogin 12y ago
Isn't there a startup that does this already? Seems way too intuitive and natural to not have happen already.
- kumar303 12y ago
  Yes. Firebase. I think Firebase is interesting because they focus on realtime data which is crucial for a lot of apps these days.
- michaelmior 12y 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/ http://www.kinvey.com/ https://backendless.com/ https://backendless.com/ https://www.parse.com/ https://www.parse.com/ http://www.baasbox.com/ http://www.baasbox.com/
- cobrabyte 12y ago
  Strongloop has http://loopback.io http://loopback.io which has been interesting to work with. Looking to free up some time to investigate a little further!
  - nni 12y 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 :)
- orandolabs 12y ago
  Orando Labs (https://orandolabs.com 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 12y ago
Does anyone know who made this video?
moonlighter 12y ago
There's more information about AWS Cognito beginning at the 1:03:00 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr6WirGn-6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr6WirGn-6k
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Keyframe 12y ago
Why would anyone outsource such a thing to another company/service?
KamiCrit 12y ago
Did Amazon just change the name of the product that was topping HN yesterday?
- pests 12y ago
  Did you even try reading the link?
xianshou 12y ago
So, Amazon Parse? Looks like the big four (Apple, Google, Amazon, FB) all have to ahem...back(end) it up now.
- frik 12y ago
  Big five (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft)
joeframbach 12y 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.
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amirmc 12y 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/ http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020125 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8005130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8005130 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726748
- michaelmior 12y 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.
  - amirmc 12y 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-lines/ http://amirchaudhry.com/from-jekyll-to-unikernel-in-fifty-li...
dksidana 12y ago
I would love to know if there are any open source alternatives to such solution.
- knicholes 12y ago
  How about Riak? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11351866/does-riak-have-any-synchronization-features-to-help-synch-mobile-and-web-apps http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11351866/does-riak-have-a...
- dksidana 12y ago
  Closet alternative, I have seen till now, is Pouchdb https://github.com/pouchdb/pouchdb https://github.com/pouchdb/pouchdb
jflowers45 12y 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.
sophacles 12y 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.
- skram 12y ago
  Have you seen Stormpath?
  - sophacles 12y ago
    I have now. Thanks for the pointer!
- deleted 12y ago
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- idea_shot 12y ago
  Check out Mobile Identity Connect -> http://www.kinvey.com/blog/3856/mobile-identity-for-the-enterprise-kinvey-launches-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 http://devcenter.kinvey.com/ios/guides/auth-link-for-ldap
  - sophacles 12y 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 12y 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.
skram 12y 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 12y 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/9920541483627238 http://aws.amazon.com/releasenotes/JavaScript/99205414836272...
  - skram 12y ago
    Thanks for the link!
- ColinCera 12y ago
  It says on the page they provide a web service API accessible to any application.
mey 12y ago
Looking into the service, the identify providers they support are Amazon (naturally), Google and Facebook.
mamcx 12y 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.
- orandolabs 12y ago
  EnduroSync (https://orandolabs.com https://orandolabs.com) will get you close. It's a light weight object store that sits on top of sqlite.
dperfect 12y 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 12y 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.
  - dperfect 12y ago
SimianLogic2 12y 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?
- nni 12y 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/ 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-intro/gsg-aws-billing-alert.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/awsgsg-intr...), but still...
  - ColinCera 12y 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 12y 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.
glynjackson 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.
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haberman 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
  https://payments.amazon.com/home https://payments.amazon.com/home
- newobj 12y ago
  Amazon Payments launched in 2007, and Stripe lunched publicly in 20011.
orandolabs 12y ago
The similarities between Cognito and EnduroSync (Orando Labs, https://orandolabs.com 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 12y 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 12y ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=UR0qsHWl9aM https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=UR0qsHWl9aM
joshdance 12y ago
Amazon and their ambition has no bounds. They really are the grizzly bear in the room of online services.
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donniezazen 12y 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.?
orandolabs 12y ago
In response to this announcement, Orando Labs (https://orandolabs.com 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 http://orandolabs.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/amazon-cognito

425 points by moonlighter 12y ago

JTon 12y 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 12y ago
This makes Amazon competitors to various backend-as-a-service startups (like Parse), so yes, it's interesting.
- JTon 12y 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.
  - plorkyeran 12y ago
    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.
    - JTon 12y ago
      Ah, I didn't know about the duplicate URL rule. That makes more sense. I've been here for quite a while and I haven't noticed such an aggressive advance before. So it triggered an alarm. Maybe I'll start seeing it more often
danso 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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"!

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aashaykumar92 12y 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.

mikecb 12y ago

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

wiradikusuma 12y ago
I would say it's closer to http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/06/cloud-enabling-your-mobile-app.html http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/06/cloud-enabli...
- mikecb 12y ago
  Yeah, I knew there was something else too. All are little code or code-free backend services.

matthewarkin 12y ago

So Amazon is now competing with Facebook / Parse?

hodgesmr 12y ago
And new iCloud. And new Dropbox API. And Helios.
- mkr-hn 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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!
Iftheshoefits 12y 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/ 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)?

diafygi 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
  The Cognito marketing materials claim that it supports "intelligent conflict resolution".

bshimmin 12y ago

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

bellerocky 12y 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 12y ago
Amazon is a weird name too.
- xhroot 12y ago
  As were the originally proposed names "Cadabra" and "Relentless" (http://www.relentless.com http://www.relentless.com still redirects to Amazon).
danso 12y 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.

fragsworth 12y 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.

moonlighter 12y 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 12y 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.
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- riffraff 12y 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.
  - 12y ago

yalogin 12y ago

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

kumar303 12y ago
Yes. Firebase. I think Firebase is interesting because they focus on realtime data which is crucial for a lot of apps these days.
michaelmior 12y 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/ http://www.kinvey.com/ https://backendless.com/ https://backendless.com/ https://www.parse.com/ https://www.parse.com/ http://www.baasbox.com/ http://www.baasbox.com/
cobrabyte 12y ago
Strongloop has http://loopback.io http://loopback.io which has been interesting to work with. Looking to free up some time to investigate a little further!
- nni 12y 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 :)
orandolabs 12y ago
Orando Labs (https://orandolabs.com 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 12y ago

Does anyone know who made this video?

moonlighter 12y ago

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

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Keyframe 12y ago

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

KamiCrit 12y ago

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

pests 12y ago
Did you even try reading the link?

xianshou 12y ago

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

frik 12y ago
Big five (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft)

joeframbach 12y 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.

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amirmc 12y 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/ http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020125 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8005130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8005130 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726748

michaelmior 12y 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.
- amirmc 12y 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-lines/ http://amirchaudhry.com/from-jekyll-to-unikernel-in-fifty-li...

dksidana 12y ago

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

knicholes 12y ago
How about Riak? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11351866/does-riak-have-any-synchronization-features-to-help-synch-mobile-and-web-apps http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11351866/does-riak-have-a...
dksidana 12y ago
Closet alternative, I have seen till now, is Pouchdb https://github.com/pouchdb/pouchdb https://github.com/pouchdb/pouchdb

jflowers45 12y 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.

sophacles 12y 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.

skram 12y ago
Have you seen Stormpath?
- sophacles 12y ago
  I have now. Thanks for the pointer!
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idea_shot 12y ago
Check out Mobile Identity Connect -> http://www.kinvey.com/blog/3856/mobile-identity-for-the-enterprise-kinvey-launches-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 http://devcenter.kinvey.com/ios/guides/auth-link-for-ldap
- sophacles 12y 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 12y 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.

skram 12y 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 12y 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/9920541483627238 http://aws.amazon.com/releasenotes/JavaScript/99205414836272...
- skram 12y ago
  Thanks for the link!
ColinCera 12y ago
It says on the page they provide a web service API accessible to any application.

mey 12y ago

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

mamcx 12y 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.

orandolabs 12y ago
EnduroSync (https://orandolabs.com https://orandolabs.com) will get you close. It's a light weight object store that sits on top of sqlite.

dperfect 12y 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 12y 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.
- dperfect 12y ago

SimianLogic2 12y 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?

nni 12y 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/ 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-intro/gsg-aws-billing-alert.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/awsgsg-intr...), but still...
- ColinCera 12y 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 12y 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.

glynjackson 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.

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haberman 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
https://payments.amazon.com/home https://payments.amazon.com/home
newobj 12y ago
Amazon Payments launched in 2007, and Stripe lunched publicly in 20011.

orandolabs 12y ago

The similarities between Cognito and EnduroSync (Orando Labs, https://orandolabs.com 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 12y 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 12y ago

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

joshdance 12y ago

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

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donniezazen 12y 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.?

orandolabs 12y ago

In response to this announcement, Orando Labs (https://orandolabs.com 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 http://orandolabs.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/amazon-cognito