What is Amazon Cognito?
Welcome to the Amazon Cognito Developer Guide. Amazon Cognito is a service that enables you to create unique identities for your users and authenticate them using either your own user pools or by using federated identity providers. You can save mobile user data, such as app preferences or game state, in the AWS Cloud without writing any backend code or managing any infrastructure.
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Are You a First-Time Amazon Cognito User?
If you are a first-time user of Amazon Cognito, we recommend that you begin by reading the following sections:
Features of Amazon Cognito
Amazon Cognito Identity: Amazon Cognito Identity enables you to create unique identities for your users and authenticate them with federated identity providers. With a federated identity, you can obtain temporary, limited-privilege AWS credentials to synchronize data with Amazon Cognito Sync, or directly access other AWS services. Amazon Cognito Identity supports federated identity providers—Amazon, Facebook, and Google—as well as unauthenticated identities. It also supports developer authenticated identities, which let you register and authenticate users via your own backend authentication process.
Amazon Cognito Identity User Pools (Beta): You can create and maintain a user directory and add sign-up and sign-in to your mobile app or web application using Amazon Cognito Identity user pools. User pools scale to hundreds of millions of users and provide simple, secure, and low-cost options for you as a developer. For more information, see Amazon Cognito Identity: Creating and Managing User Pools (Beta).
Amazon Cognito Sync: Amazon Cognito Sync is an AWS service and client library that enables cross-device syncing of application-related user data. You can use it to synchronize user profile data across mobile devices and the web without requiring your own backend. The client libraries cache data locally so your app can read and write data regardless of device connectivity status. When the device is online, you can synchronize data, and if you set up push sync, notify other devices immediately that an update is available.
Accessing Amazon Cognito
Amazon Cognito Identity can be accessed by the Amazon Cognito console, the AWS CLI, and the Amazon Cognito Identity APIs.
Amazon Cognito Identity can be accessed by the Amazon Cognito console, the AWS Command Line Interface, and the User Pools APIs.
Amazon Cognito Sync can be accessed by the Amazon Cognito console, the AWS Command Line Interface, and the Amazon Cognito Sync APIs.
Pricing for Amazon Cognito
For information on Amazon Cognito pricing, see https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/.
