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Learn how to use Cognito
for your apps.
Hello there! I'm David Wells 👋
Over the last few years, I helped build and maintain some of large applications using AWS Cognito as the authentication backbone. During this journey, I realized there was a lack of resources on how to actually use the darn thing!
AWS Cognito is a mixed bag for most developers. There are many sharp edges and gotchas when using the service for the first time. Like most AWS services the documentation is rather verbose and hard to parse.
This learning steep is what lead me to write this book.
This book was spawned out of the frustration and things I wish someone told me when I was beginning to use Cognito.
The good news is this book is here to help get you over that hurdle to the truly powerful service that cognito provides.
This is what lead me to write this book
Cognito is a fully managed authentication service from Amazon web services.
It allows devs to quickly add user management to their applications. It's complete with features like login/logout, sending reset password emails, multi-factor authentication, OAuth support for social logins and a lot more.
It can be used in web, mobile, CLIs & on the server in any programming language to authorize & protect your backend APIs.
Cognito comes with a lot of power. We will cover them in depth in the book.
Cognito is a fully managed service. Because of this, there are no scaling concerns, security patches or other typically developer operational tasks that tend to suck up developers time.
This means you avoid the tedious, non-differentiated auth & ops bits and can focus on the fun part, building products your customers love.
Implementing your own auth system might sound fun (or not), but comes with a high amount of complexity and is easy to get wrong. This can be quite dangerous for your business, your users information and your sanity.
In essence, Cognito is a "serverless" service you can use for any size application and will scale to meet any demand. Addtionally, like many serverless offerings, it is pay-per-use & is extremely economical as you get more and more users onboarded.
Fantastic! There are a couple great serverless auth solutions out there. I've used them all and I compare and constrast them with Cognito in the book.
Spoiler* I prefer cognito (shocker!) due to it's ability to scale & it's favorable pricing structure 💵.
For any developers who wants a battle tested, cost effective, & scalable auth solution that can be used for any use case.
For any developer who wants to fast track the steep learning curve of AWS Cognito.
For any developer who wants to learn how to secure their applications, CLIs, backend services.
I suffered, experimented, and ultimately failed my way to success using the service and I'm here to share it all.