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  5. Amazon API Gateway vs Amazon Cognito

Amazon API Gateway vs Amazon Cognito

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon Cognito
Amazon Cognito
Stacks616
Followers917
Votes34
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon API Gateway
Stacks1.4K
Followers1.1K
Votes45

Amazon API Gateway vs Amazon Cognito: What are the differences?

Introduction

Amazon API Gateway and Amazon Cognito are both services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for building and securing APIs. While they both play a role in developing APIs, they have key differences in their functionalities and use cases.

  1. Authentication and Authorization:

    • Amazon API Gateway handles authentication and authorization primarily for APIs. It integrates with various authentication mechanisms like IAM, Cognito user pools, and custom authorizers.
    • In contrast, Amazon Cognito is a full-fledged authentication and user management service. It provides features like user sign-up and sign-in, managing user profiles, and password resets.

  2. API Management and Deployment:

    • Amazon API Gateway is mainly focused on managing APIs and providing a scalable infrastructure for API deployment. It offers features like API versioning, caching, throttling, and logging.
    • On the other hand, Amazon Cognito is not designed for API management or deployment. It is primarily focused on user authentication and authorization in web and mobile applications.

  3. User Identity and Access Control:

    • Amazon Cognito provides user identity management and access control features. It allows you to create user pools to manage user identities, including sign-up, sign-in, and user attributes.
    • In contrast, Amazon API Gateway does not have built-in user management capabilities. It primarily relies on external authentication mechanisms like IAM roles or Cognito user pools for user access control.

  4. Scalability and Performance:

    • Amazon API Gateway provides scalable infrastructure for handling and managing API traffic. It automatically scales to handle high volumes of requests and provides built-in caching and throttling mechanisms.
    • Amazon Cognito is designed to handle user authentication and authorization and does not provide built-in scalability for API traffic. It is more focused on the user management aspect of applications.

  5. Integration with AWS Services:

    • Amazon API Gateway integrates well with other AWS services like AWS Lambda, AWS DynamoDB, and AWS S3. It allows for easy integration and orchestration of backend services to build serverless architectures.
    • Amazon Cognito also integrates with AWS services, but primarily for user management purposes. It can be used together with Amazon API Gateway to provide authentication and authorization features for APIs.

  6. Pricing Model:

    • Amazon API Gateway has a pricing model based on API calls, data transfer, and caching. It offers a free tier for low usage volumes.
    • Amazon Cognito has a pricing model based on monthly active users (MAUs). The pricing tiers are based on the number of MAUs in your user pool.

In summary, Amazon API Gateway focuses on API management, deployment, and scalability, while Amazon Cognito is primarily focused on user authentication, authorization, and user management in web and mobile applications.

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Advice on Amazon Cognito, Amazon API Gateway

Brent
Brent

CEO at DEFY Labs

Mar 7, 2020

Decided

I started our team on Amazon Cognito because I was a Solutions Architect at AWS and found it really easy to follow the tutorials and get a basic app up and running with it.

When our team started working with it, they very quickly became frustrated because of the poor documentation. After 4 days of trying to get all the basic passwordless auth working, our lead engineer made the decision to abandon it and try Auth0... and managed to get everything implemented in 4 hours.

The consensus was that Cognito just isn't mature enough or well-documented, and that the implementation does not cater for real world use cases the way that it should. I believe Amplify has made some of this simpler, but I would still recommend Auth0 as it's been bulletproof for us, and is a sensible price.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon Cognito
Amazon Cognito
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon API Gateway

You can create unique identities for your users through a number of public login providers (Amazon, Facebook, and Google) and also support unauthenticated guests. You can save app data locally on users’ devices allowing your applications to work even when the devices are offline.

Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.

Manage Unique Identities;Work Offline;Store and Sync across Devices;Seamless Guest Access;Safeguard AWS Credentials;Control Access to AWS Resources
Build, Deploy and Manage APIs; Resiliency;API Lifecycle Management;SDK Generation;API Operations Monitoring;AWS Authorization;API Keys for Third-Party Developers
Statistics
Stacks
616
Stacks
1.4K
Followers
917
Followers
1.1K
Votes
34
Votes
45
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 14
    Backed by Amazon
  • 7
    Manage Unique Identities
  • 4
    Work Offline
  • 3
    MFA
  • 2
    Store and Sync
Cons
  • 4
    Massive Pain to get working
  • 3
    Documentation often out of date
  • 2
    Login-UI sparsely customizable (e.g. no translation)
  • 1
    MFA: there is no "forget device" function
  • 1
    Docs are vast but mostly useless
Pros
  • 37
    AWS Integration
  • 7
    Websockets
  • 1
    Serverless
Cons
  • 2
    No websocket broadcast
  • 1
    Less expensive
Integrations
No integrations available
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch

What are some alternatives to Amazon Cognito, Amazon API Gateway?

Auth0

Auth0

A set of unified APIs and tools that instantly enables Single Sign On and user management to all your applications.

Stormpath

Stormpath

Stormpath is an authentication and user management service that helps development teams quickly and securely build web and mobile applications and services.

Kong

Kong

Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform.

Keycloak

Keycloak

It is an Open Source Identity and Access Management For Modern Applications and Services. It adds authentication to applications and secure services with minimum fuss. No need to deal with storing users or authenticating users. It's all available out of the box.

Devise

Devise

Devise is a flexible authentication solution for Rails based on Warden

Firebase Authentication

Firebase Authentication

It provides backend services, easy-to-use SDKs, and ready-made UI libraries to authenticate users to your app. It supports authentication using passwords, phone numbers, popular federated identity providers like Google,

Tyk Cloud

Tyk Cloud

Tyk is a leading Open Source API Gateway and Management Platform, featuring an API gateway, analytics, developer portal and dashboard. We power billions of transactions for thousands of innovative organisations.

WorkOS

WorkOS

Start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code.

OAuth.io

OAuth.io

OAuth is a protocol that aimed to provide a single secure recipe to manage authorizations. It is now used by almost every web application. However, 30+ different implementations coexist. OAuth.io fixes this massive problem by acting as a universal adapter, thanks to a robust API. With OAuth.io integrating OAuth takes minutes instead of hours or days.

OmniAuth

OmniAuth

OmniAuth is a Ruby authentication framework aimed to abstract away the difficulties of working with various types of authentication providers. It is meant to be hooked up to just about any system, from social networks to enterprise systems to simple username and password authentication.

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