User authentication is one of the most crucial aspects of applications. It’s also almost always the first feature you create when building an application. Sure, you can go about building your authentication and authorization for your web app, but building a secure authentication service is a complex and time-consuming task and you expose your app and your users to unnecessary risks.
This is where third-party authentication services come in. They provide secure authentication, scalability, and a pleasant user experience. There are many services available in the market right now, but we’ll focus on Amazon Cognito and its offerings.
But before we dive in, why Amazon Cognito?
If you're already heavily invested in the AWS ecosystem, Cognito offers a seamless and secure way to manage user authentication for your web and mobile applications since it integrates smoothly with other AWS services like API Gateway and IAM. On top of that, Cognito is an AWS managed service, meaning you don't have to worry about your infrastructure or security maintenance, and also scales automatically to handle your growing user base. In terms of pricing on the other hand, for low to medium user volumes, Cognito offers a free tier, so if you're just starting out, it might just be perfect for you.
What is Amazon Cognito?
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- On Step 1, ensure that for authentication providers Cognito User Pool is selected. Also, click on Username and email for the sign-in options.
For Step 3, keep everything as default.
Enable self-registration, and allow Cognito to automatically send messages to verify and confirm. For attributes to verify, choose Send email message, and verify email address. For verifying attribute changes, ensure that Keep original attribute value active when an update is pending is checked. For required attributes, ensure that email is chosen by default.For Step 5, pick Send email with Cognito. This is appropriate since we are just testing out the features, but Amazon SES is recommended for use for enterprise-level workloads.
For SMS messages, Create a new IAM Role, and name itCognitoSMSor whatever you prefer.
For the app client, ensure that the Public client is chosen. For the client name, you can choose the same name for your pool name, or something else. Click on Do not generate client secret. For your callback URL, use https://[your domain name].auth.us-west-2.amazoncognito.com/auth-callback (This won't work since we do not have an application, and the information goes nowhere. We're just using this as a placeholder so Cognito allows us to create the user pool.
- Lastly, review your choices and click on Create user pool.
Once your User pool has been created, you can click on it and navigate to App integration. Once you're there, scroll down to your App clients and click on your App client. Navigate to the Hosted UI segment and click on View Hosted UI.
- Cognito will send you a verification code in your email, look for it and enter it on the verification page.
, and click on your user pool.
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