Cognito Cheat Sheet

This cheat sheet is based on the AWS Certified Developer Associate walk through by Andrew Brown. Originally I wrote down the cheat sheet from his presentation. However, I thought maybe others might have a use for the same cheat sheet in a searchable format. I really encourage you to watch his walk through over at YouTube.

  • Cognito - is a decentralized managed authentication system. When you need to easily add authentication to your mobile and desktop app think Cognito
  • User Pools - is the user directory. Allows users to authenticate using OAuth to IDP such as Facebook, Google, Amazon to connect to web-applications. Cognito User Pool is a IDP in itself
  • User Pools use JWTs to persist authentication
  • Identity Pools - provide temporary AWS credentials to access services like S3 or DynamoDB
  • Cognito Sync - can sync user data and preferences across devices with one line of code (powered by SNS)
  • Web Identity Federation - exchange identity and security information between and identity provider (IDP)
  • Identity Provider (IDP) - a trusted provider of your user identity that lets you use authenticate to access other services like Facebook, Twitter, Google or Amazon
  • OIDC - is a type of Identity Provider which uses OAuth
  • SAML - is a type of Identity Provider which is used for Single Sign-on

Credits

Andrew Brown from ExamPro