AWS Cognito Basics — User Pools

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Introduction

Amazon Cognito is a robust user directory service that handles user registration, authentication, account recovery & other operations for easy and fast web/mobile application development.

This service helps you manage your authentication, authorization and user management functions so that you can focus on your application management rather than managing users and authentication.

AWS Cognito provides two kinds of solutions based on the nature of the authentication:

User Pools

• User pools are user directories that provide sign-up and sign-in options for your app users.
• They are used for managing account and permissions for our applications.

Identity Pools

• Identity pools enable you to grant your users access to other AWS services.
• They are used for managing permissions for AWS services (e.g. S3 storage, EC2 instances etc.)

AWS Cognito is very flexible and can be used for different use cases and application types, so we will take a step by step approach to see how to handle various use cases and this way it will be easier to manage complexity.