Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I share the OP's pain we chose to use cognito for the exact same reason and I've had the exact same pain however the evaluation of itself takes time and the inconvenience OP is suffering with is only a function of having users.
If I were starting my startup again I would, in almost every instance, trade problems if we have some success for reduced decision fatigue at the start.
by etothepii - I used to be an architect with a bag of pro certifications for the world's largest AWS services provider/developer/reseller (we even did a lot of work for Amazon.com themselves). I gave it up a few years ago when it became clear that for most people, moving OUT of the cloud was a far better move than moving IN.
In a lot of ways, I really love AWS, but most of the high-value services are increasingly flaky and questionably supported, and nearly all of them have (often not very obvious) lock-in barbs.
For a while, cloud native development actually made sense. But as Cloud services have converged to become just big Kubernetes providers with API sprinkles (whose syntax is often more vinegary than sugary), there is less and less value there.
Add to that that almost no companies really need a huge cloud-based system to run their businesses, and that $500-2500 computers literally outstrip the performance of supercomputers from around the turn of the century in every respect, and there is less and less real need for cloud services...
by dublin - Regardless of AI gen'd article... Cognito does have some rough edges. One day I'd like to make a best practices Cloudformation template (if doesn't already exist) that includes things like which login name to set, notification lambdas and the like.
One big pro about cognito.. can't beat the price.
by samdixon - They added new enterprise features, free ride is over if you want any improvements made to the service in the last 8 years.by arpinum
- I don't disagree that AWS Cognito isn't the easiest auth service to work with, but once you figure it out, it works just as well as the others.
I've experienced the same exact pains (and many more) that the author described. But the thing is that once you've experienced those pains, you know how to deal with them. In software, you just have to figure it out once and then it's done.
I can't say I scaled Cognito usage to anything massive, but I can say that keeping everything in AWS is worth the hassle (at least depending on the context). Cognito provides plenty of options of actual customization (the hosted UI is only good for initial testing, then toss it). And, of course, LLMs are able to deal with Cognito just as easily as any other auth service. I didn't have the luxury of using LLMs when I set up Cognito, but it's still my go-to for auth and Claude doesn't stumble on it.
by nater5000 - AWS documentation is the best excuse to stay away from their services. I thank everyday for their documents, it's like putting a lighthouse on an iceberg.
- Personally I would never build my business on a technology tied to a specific vendor that makes it difficult to switch if said vendor delivers a poor service or massively raises the price.by dabinat
- When evaluating a third-party service like Cognito in this case or a mail provider, I either require that it uses an open standard for access like SMTP or the interface that I need to use is small enough that I can wrap it in my own layer of indirection so I can easily mock it and swap it out later. Most of the time I never switch it. But god damn, does it feel good to know that I can move if I need to and I'm not locked in.by jjice
- Cognito has real rough edges, this article doesn't really mention any of them.
If you've ever tried to implement, say, a working SAML integration through Cognito, you'll know how obscure the flow is. I've had to work with the Cognito team to get real showstopping bugs fixed.
Definitely not AWS's most polished service, but workable if you know the ins and outs.
by cldcntrl - Don't even get me started on backups or other basic functionality one would expect from a service like this. AWS should either make an acquisition (Auth0 or a smaller company like Wristband?) and rebuild the service, or just kill it. Instead, we have a critical service that enterprises rely on stuck in limbo...by mikigraf
- Auth0 already was acquired.by tietjens
- I remember talking to the Cognito team about password reset and arguing with them that being able to set a password was a required feature. They were like "no, why would you never have to not go through the reset flow? That's a security problem." Then of course they added it in a few weeks later because every admin needs to do that. So at some point they had a bunch of people working on it who had like zero operational experience.
Two benefits to Cognito are (1) it allows you to log into a service without having any credentials locally, and (2) that Cognito identity allows you to provide access to AWS resources. You can probably do that now, but plenty of solutions still require an on-device key...which is an obvious security issue.
Also, using your own backend for authentication made it easier to manage things because your auth wasn't trapped inside Cognito.
by mannyv - My experience with Cognito matches the author's experience exactly. I mostly used Auth0 in the past, but we switched to Cognito for a new project because it would be cheaper.
Don't like that email addresses are case sensitive, and now you want to change that? Sorry, you gotta create a new user pool from scratch--no way to migrate.
by patwolf - That’s really the worst feature of it. When you first set it up you’re asked at least a dozen questions that you probably have no idea what they mean. But you have to pick something. And whatever you pick on that first day setup you are stuck with FOREVER. Unless you do a complex data migration task.
Also, want to migrate to a different provider? Sorry. You can’t get the hashed passwords out. So if you do a migration it will be painful to users since they’ll have to do a password reset.
Yes it’s cheap. But you get what you pay for.
by oofbey - > Next time, I’m picking a tool based on developer experience first, not AWS service integration convenience. The time we lost debugging Cognito issues could have paid for several years of a paid auth provider.
How many paid auth providers let you export user password hashes so that you can seamlessly migrate to another vendor, if you want to?
The whole problem with auth is that both (a) login screens are shown to unauthenticated users, which is a superset that includes attackers, who will do everything from DDoS to crafted malicious input to try to grab user secrets, so you really want to pick something that is already running at large production scale and with all the production battle-scars, and (b) that need to go with a managed vendor is very much in tension against local development, vendor independence, data portability, and other Good Engineering Practices (TM).
Sure, AWS Cognito sucks. In many ways, the product feels stuck. Making compromises to get stuff shipped, working, and stable sucks. But honestly, unless you're going to prefer (b) over (a) (and there are times to do so, in particular with intranet applications behind a firewall that aren't really susceptble to those kinds of attacks) and pick something like Keycloak, you could do a lot worse than Cognito (shudder, Okta, shudder).
by solatic - Ory let's you do this I believe.by goosejuice
- Pretty much all of them do. Auth0 will be annoying about it but even they will do it
I'm struggling to think of one that's refused in my experience.
by cco - > How many paid auth providers let you export user password hashes so that you can seamlessly migrate to another vendor, if you want to?
Clerk is surely one of the biggest and allows you to do this.
by MrAlex94 - Personally I feel the password migration feature should never be supported. Its ripe for abuse once you open up a pathway to it. SCIM as a protocol was meant to solve this problem, if everyone could just implement it.by sandeepkd
- Auth0 and Firebase both let you export user password hashes (though I believe you need to open a support ticket in order to do it in Auth0's case at least).
I think Cognito is actually one of the few with absolutely no path to achieving this.
by voxic11 - Counter point: How many paid auth providers force you to create an entirely new deployment and then use a lambda to migrate within their own system? Especially for something as seemingly simple like adding another metadata field?
I think they allow export because they drew some interesting lines around their own mutability concerns.
I also would never use cognito again.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/co...
by leetrout - > Reading Cognito docs feels like someone took three separate manuals, threw them in a blender, and then sprinkled in some outdated Stack Overflow answers for flavor.
This is my experience with basically all of AWS documentation. It is nearly always either (1) far too high-level to be of any actual use, or (2) far too verbose, with a massive volume of superfluous information I need to parse and discard before I get to the stuff I am trying to figure out.
As just one example, I recently needed to link an AWS Partner Central account with an AWS Management account, and process and documentation was painfully complicated: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/partner-central/latest/getting-s...
by wilkystyle - when LLMs first became popular my first real use for them was to find information about AWS services. LLMs have read it all and can (mostly) synthesize what you ask if it is in the docs.by DanielHB
- I reckon the documentation was fine. Together with AWS reinvent videos and together with well architected. Except for IAM that was a huuuge struggle.
Sadly no companies at all are qilling to use anything else than Azure nowadays.
by unixhero - Had to go through the exact same process of linking Partner Central with Marketplace. The console suggested following multiple video tutorials and linked to docs that may be outdated.
They have this AI tool on every page that links to the same content or references settings panes without linking anything.
by sorentwo - I always say that AWS docs are exhaustive, but exhausting. Mostly because they're spread across half a dozen places. The answer you need is normally in there somewhere, but good luck finding it. And when I remember the docs contain some fact I want re-reference, I can never find it again.by ryanchants
- >It is nearly always either (1) far too high-level to be of any actual use, or (2) far too verbose, with a massive volume of superfluous information I need to parse and discard before I get to the stuff I am trying to figure out.
I guess that's what they trained Opus 5 on
by sznio - I love it when I read some AWS docs to get a feel for what to do, start to build things, find something that seems like it should just work, then do a lot of digging to figure out what I'm doing wrong, only to find a slightly different page of pretty much the same documentation stating whatever I was wanting to do just isn't supported and can't be done, and I've just wasted a day or two trying.
Fun times.
by vel0city - That’s my experience with any of the 3 hyperscalers when reading docs. Millions of versions, blog posts and just overall massive challenge to get to the root of it. Funny the one thing I was always able to immediately and quickly digest, AWS Textract because they have a great python library with the kind of documentation I expect from a python project.by infecto