> 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Cognito docs feels like someone took three separate manuals, threw them in a blender, and then sprinkled in some outdated Stack Overflow answers for flavor.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.
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.
My experience with Boto: need some S3 manipulation logic, here is an official documentation that shows how to solve the exact problem with Boto, one caveat, this version of Boto is deprecated. Do the same with the newest version? Not possible.
I do not really want to defend any of the companies here but the reality is that documentation is always a thankless job. People do it to get their project out there, get limelight and move on. There is not much incentive for the teams to manage the documentation actively unless the its a business priority.
I am myself in the IDP business, was trying to understand the pain points of the user. Even though I am not big fan of AWS but I find that the concerns are baked into the hope that using an IDP would some how make is very easy
> Flexibility of doing local development while on plane
Really depends what you are expecting from the IDP but personally this is one off situation and in most cases its not worth solving. We are in such a interconnected or dependent state where local development without internet is really hard.
> Configuration issue
The features of a solution are two edged sword, it provides people options to tailor it for their own use case and yet at the same time it adds to the learning curve. Good default might have been useful here, however it looks like Author only wanted email and nothing else so it was a departure from defaults
> UI customization
A lot of providers allow some flexibility with the UI but not a whole lot. And then some allow you to host on your website and call the API's for the authentication flows using SDK. Personally this one is tricky, its a UX vs security topic. As a thumb rule never trust the client. The request headers and ability to interact with browsers are what provides you with relatively better state and session control. As an IDP provider I do not want to loose that and still be on the hook for security.
> That’s my experience with any of the 3 hyperscalers when reading docs.
I used to hate the AWS docs, now I use Azure and I hate that so much more. At least AWS had loads of (bad) docs that you could string together to figure out how to do something. With Azure, there's just no docs (except for bad videos), and they literally tell you (at the top of every page) that you can do this with AI (I know I can do it with AI, but I'd prefer if I could read your docs to make sure the machine isn't doing something dumb).
My expectation is that I'll end up on GCP in a few years, and that will be bad in hilariously different ways.
I feel like I'm the only person on HN that doesn't have any major (or cliche) problems with GCP, even after using it for a decade at this point. Like it's not perfect and I've hit weird roadblocks along the way but I've dabbled AWS and I currently use Azure at work and those are hilariously bad in their own ways, people just seem to kind of be used to it?
To be fair the jokes about GCP are pretty accurate. Although the documentation isn't that bad when it exists, there's just not that much of it, you better not be trying to do anything uncommon.
But then I look at Azure and I'm not laughing. I don't know what is going on at Azure, but in some areas the docs straight up do not match reality. And then the weird error codes you randomly get out of Azure are, I assume, only understood by God and one guy who had been quietly working at MS for years but was replaced by Copilot, and now only God knows.
I like GCP as well, having previously used AWS for many years.
The biggest issue is that it's taken Google a long time to figure out what enterprise security is - it's not something what was in their DNA - and the product shows it. They're too focused on weird fancy half-assed "beyond" solutions to properly implement the basics. They dangle clever federated etc. solutions that only work in some circumstances so that you're better off just avoiding them, but the more basic alternatives are limited in their own way because they focus too much on the fancier solutions.
They get promoted for fucking with them. We were in the middle of a big fight with Microsoft support over a product defect. They literally updated the product docs in realtime and revised the sizing guidance for the product to be about 5% under our sizing. It was too specific a number to be a coincidence.
We were at war with them, so the team was capturing the documentation and timestamping it. They gaslit us to run the clock so the product would slide outside of mainstream support.
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.
>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 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.
Most of my interactions with AWS docs end up being pretty useless, as in they are information-free. Like describing how to fill out a form and press next in a wizard which boil down to "fill out the Name field with a name and press next" and every once in a while there will be a tiny amount of information but most of it is useless and usually the information you're looking for isn't there.
Nobody using AWS needs to be told "in order to add a hoozit, press the add hoozit button, fill out field A then fill out field B then fill out field C and then press next"
Now there's an interesting idea, have an LLM crawl their entire docs and cull everything obvious or content free and compile what's left
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
Yup for the Ory managed service (Ory Network) you can export all data through the admin API including hashed passwords.
Of course when self-hosting Ory you have full control over the database as well.
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.
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.
Ory Kratos has a password migration hook that lets you migrate password credentials out of anything (including Cognito) without password resets.
I believe most other (modern) auth vendors have an equivalent.
I really don't see any reason to be using Cognito in $currentyear.
Auth0 will run an export for you, but you have to file a support ticket for them to do it, and it may take them a bit of time, so you may end up with some users who get reset to a slightly old password (if they change it between the export and your import) or if you get a new registration.
Given all the pain I've suffered working with both cognito and auth0, I can't imagine a reason for using either in $currentyear.
Yea I went through this as well - when I tested it, they also required you be on a paid plan to even be able to get the export, which is kinda crazy. I work at an auth company now (Clerk) and this experience drove our current approach, which is that you can instantly export all your user data through a button in the dashboard. Maybe it's not as "sticky", but I think respecting your users when they want to get their data or migrate off is way more important.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I did some work for a sizable org who were pursuing a migration from their in-house auth to cognito. They originally scoped it at two months, and it ended up taking them six to roll it out.
Then they figured out that their cost projection was actually off by an order of magnitude. And also kept getting bitten by peripheral systems newly getting out of sync.
And so then, they embarked upon the journey to roll it all back...
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.
I've used AWS Cognito for two start ups. One is still trucking. Cognito definitely leaves a lot to be desired, but overall I've never encountered any major issues with it. I think it's cheap precisely bc it's lackluster, but that's fine for my needs. YMMV I guess
I built a product on Cognito in 2017-18 or when it was, and already back then it felt semi-abandonded. Thankfully that particular product never really took off and we didn't have to spend too much time on wrangling Cognito.
AWS is good at operations, i.e. running something like S3 at massive scale. Or SQS, ddb, etc. High surface area for distributed systems, but low surface area for user experience.
Once you add in product decision making, like how to make the dev experience good on something with alot of user flows (like cognito), the products are shit.
Yeah good example of this also with the agent stuff they are pushing now, documentation can read to be sales-like and then as you start using it stuff starts to fall apart. At this point there are better open source alternatives (self-hosting) for pretty much anything not requiring specialized hardware
In a previous greenfield project (pre-LLM) I considered using Cognito since I was all-in on AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, ApiG, Route53, S3, SQS/SNS, and the list goes on...) but after reading through the docs I wanted to pull my hair out. What I thought was going to be a time-saving measure turned into a quagmire. Even with my level of "lock in" I was not willing to hand over auth and so I rolled my own (and it worked fine).
Nowadays I can't imagine using a 3rd-party for something like auth (or many other things) due to lock-in and also just always needing to conform to their way of doing things.
Apologies for the non-sequitur but 2 days ago I saw FreshDesk had deleted my account (free plan) that I had been using (sparingly, <50 tickets total if I had to guess) for 3+ years. No email, no notice, just deleted my account and broke the sites that I had integrated their feedback widget into. I reached out to see what was going on and they pretty much told me I had to upgrade if I wanted my account back.
Now 1-2 years ago I would have considered paying. In fact I would have considered paying IF they had contacted me to say "pay up or we will delete" but the fact they deleted it without any contact meant FreshDesk was dead to me. I started, for all of 1 minute, to consider the alternatives before I fired up Claude and in <2hrs I had a full replacement for all the parts of FreshDesk I was using (basic ticketing, emails, statuses, file upload).
The build-vs-buy decision has completely flipped for me. I have a hard time thinking of paying for something my platform depends on, especially auth, when it's so easy to build it now.
Side Note: that "all-in" AWS project? Yeah, with Claude's help I'm off 90% of the AWS's services and while it's still hosted there I can move to any VPS if I want now that I've removed my dependencies on AWS-specific concepts. It's been glorious and it has the side effect of meaning my local dev more-closely matches the deployed code since there isn't AWS-magic I have to fake anymore.
Auth is a bit of a different beast when it comes to the build vs buy debate though. A competent auth provider has the infrastructure (and necessary data) to deflect against DDoS attacks, bots, etc.
I noticed this week that the menu button on LinkedIn posts now lets you choose "Seems like AI slop" as an option. How bold of them to call it what it is...
Hacker News is ready for something besides "flag," because it's very frustrating to have so much LLM-generated noise clogging up /classic.
Yes, Cognito is a mess. But why can't you write about it in your own voice? Hope the clicks and SEO juice was worth insulting your readers' limited time, Josh Karamuth.
8/10 times, you don't need these 3rd party providers. Yes, someone is going to tell me all about the SSOs, SCIMs, Audit Logs etc etc but the point is that 8/10 applications are simple enough to build their own Auth. The rest, go for these services. I never understood the appeal of these 3rd party providers who can hold you hostage just for your users to login ? In 2026 ? I don't get it. May be I am dumb.
I’ve been pondering a deep dive into Keycloak or Ory. Or is WorkOS good enough for the price?
I’m looking to centralize account management across multiple systems.
We've been using Keycloak for a while, it's definitely not bad, but there are times when it's been frustrating, and getting it both stable and scalable seem to be incompatible goals.
It's super powerful and can do whatever you want it to do (at least if you are comfortable writing Java SPI). But there's a lot of knowledge of how to set things up that takes time and is not readily acquired.
For the record we looked at Ory early on, but it was not mature enough and didn't offer a full IdP stack at the time. We've since looked again and found there to be some conventions around how it works that made it hard for us to consider migrating from Keycloak.
This may now mean something along the lines of "struggling to grind through..." but is based on the original meaning of having sex without a condom, typically with misogynist overtones. You might want to avoid it for this style of writing and audience.
Not really. The term is a shortened version of "sucks eggs", which is originally from Shakespeare and used to describe an odious creature or habit (a weasel in Shakespeare's case).
I both hate and love Cognito. Hate it for its unnecessary complexity, love it for providing auth at bargain bin prices. I review Auth0 contracts frequently and that is daylight robbery/extortion, a poster child for vendor-lock-in. I had hopes for clerk.dev, but unfortunately the auth business optimizes for deep lock-in + steadily escalating prices.
After working through a few transitions to/from Auth0 that is something I never ever want to do again at scale.
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...
Feels like there are a few categories of services from cloud providers,
There’s the basic infrastructure we know and love like S3, EC2, etc.
There’s the higher level but still basic stuff that just makes a lot of sense. I like ECS + Fargate, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS.
And then there are the tarpits. CloudFormation. Cognito. Step Functions. API Gateway. They do something useful (otherwise why would they exist?) but the main point of their existence seems to be to trap you in AWS, and the fact that they solve a problem seems secondary. Some of them are cheap (CloudFormation is free!) but in general they seem like expensive alternatives to simpler, cheaper solutions.
The further up the stack you go, the worse it gets - but, honestly, Cognito and API Gateway are no worse than mid-tier.
The really nightmarish ones are the likes of CodeStar, AppRunner, Directory Service, CodeCatalyst, and 90% of anything under the Systems Manager heading. Things that tend to be glued together from multiple lower-level services with a sprinkling of vendor lock-in on top.
This is so weird because AI should be good at updating the docs.
And yet, I often think this about things which still suck even though AI is good at them. Like why is Siri so bad still. Why do so many basic things in windows 11 not work, like folder search? Why does Altium or anything by Xilinx always have outdated docs that refer to menus that dont exist anymore?
At least it's formatted readably and they took the time to ask the AI to make it less AI-like. The tone is annoying but I try to focus on the message and not how it's communicated.
You'd think making AI do the annoying integration work would mean less complaints about terrible docs and API.
Just use whatever service that costs 10x as much to make it do what it was advertised to do in the first place, like DAX for dynamo or cloudfront for S3 in case you hit “scale” like 2000 req/sec
... or those who don't know about constant-time functions, the difference between sha1 and argon2, etc. etc.
I had to fix such things several times in corporate internet-facing systems. A generalist engineer can do this just fine, if they're aware of the state of the art, but there's nothing ensuring that they actually do. The compliance tickboxes were of no help here either.
This is a terrible suggestion. Rolling your own auth nowadays is like rolling your own encryption. It’s just a bad idea. OAuth and OIDC are massive specs that are constantly changing and you’re going to be stuck chasing and developing auth instead of your actual product.
I know because this is what my brain dead principal engineer did and I’ve spent the last 3 years chasing RFCs and am now going to spend the next year migrating to Keycloak because I’ve finally convinced my boss that we’re not an auth company.
I agree you shouldn't write every line by hand, you should use libraries, but pretending like OAuth/ODIC require using something like Cognito/Auto0 is just silly. An LLM can crank out the needed code in very little time and give you full control over your auth instead of fighting an auth provider at every turn.
The number of compromises something like Cognito requires are just not worth the perceived gains.
I really whole heartedly disagree and if you think it’s silly I think that you don’t really fully understand the complexity of it. An LLM doesn’t solve everything. You still need to understand the spec, become a domain expert, and design your solution for the parts that the RFCs leave open with undefined behaviour. At the very least if this is your opinion you should start with an open source solution like Keycloak or authentic and fork it if you really need “control”.
I already said that using a library (open source) is a good idea, I just don't think we need to pretend that Auth is so complicated that we need a third-party provider. I don't buy that argument. You should not roll your own low-level code, you should never need to even look at the RFC's, just hook into the Auth library you use (library, not service).
> just hook into the Auth library you use (library, not service).
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how this stuff works. You can't "just use a library". Your identity server is a service, open source or not and you have to align to how they do things.
I'm talking about handling the OAuth token exchange and what not. Your identity server doesn't need to be a separate service, it can be integrated into your backend. At the end of the day it's responsible for making sure client claiming to be X is X. I really don't think this is rocket science.
I've set up email/password, email magic links, SMS 2FA codes, OAuth, and it's never been this magical, mystical thing these "auth providers" want to pretend it is.
Yes, you need to wire up endpoint for you to feed data to the library (tokens), and provide ways to refresh tokens, etc but that's all just wiring up and I don't think that's really that hard (even before LLMs).
I just cannot fathom handing over as much control and third-party auth providers require you to.
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...
I am myself in the IDP business, was trying to understand the pain points of the user. Even though I am not big fan of AWS but I find that the concerns are baked into the hope that using an IDP would some how make is very easy
> Flexibility of doing local development while on plane
Really depends what you are expecting from the IDP but personally this is one off situation and in most cases its not worth solving. We are in such a interconnected or dependent state where local development without internet is really hard.
> Configuration issue
The features of a solution are two edged sword, it provides people options to tailor it for their own use case and yet at the same time it adds to the learning curve. Good default might have been useful here, however it looks like Author only wanted email and nothing else so it was a departure from defaults
> UI customization
A lot of providers allow some flexibility with the UI but not a whole lot. And then some allow you to host on your website and call the API's for the authentication flows using SDK. Personally this one is tricky, its a UX vs security topic. As a thumb rule never trust the client. The request headers and ability to interact with browsers are what provides you with relatively better state and session control. As an IDP provider I do not want to loose that and still be on the hook for security.
I used to hate the AWS docs, now I use Azure and I hate that so much more. At least AWS had loads of (bad) docs that you could string together to figure out how to do something. With Azure, there's just no docs (except for bad videos), and they literally tell you (at the top of every page) that you can do this with AI (I know I can do it with AI, but I'd prefer if I could read your docs to make sure the machine isn't doing something dumb).
My expectation is that I'll end up on GCP in a few years, and that will be bad in hilariously different ways.
There are two ways to do everything; one is deprecated and the other is not yet feature complete.
Glad to know that they're allowing their customers a taste of what it's like to work at Google.
But then I look at Azure and I'm not laughing. I don't know what is going on at Azure, but in some areas the docs straight up do not match reality. And then the weird error codes you randomly get out of Azure are, I assume, only understood by God and one guy who had been quietly working at MS for years but was replaced by Copilot, and now only God knows.
The biggest issue is that it's taken Google a long time to figure out what enterprise security is - it's not something what was in their DNA - and the product shows it. They're too focused on weird fancy half-assed "beyond" solutions to properly implement the basics. They dangle clever federated etc. solutions that only work in some circumstances so that you're better off just avoiding them, but the more basic alternatives are limited in their own way because they focus too much on the fancier solutions.
We were at war with them, so the team was capturing the documentation and timestamping it. They gaslit us to run the clock so the product would slide outside of mainstream support.
They have this AI tool on every page that links to the same content or references settings panes without linking anything.
I guess that's what they trained Opus 5 on
Nobody using AWS needs to be told "in order to add a hoozit, press the add hoozit button, fill out field A then fill out field B then fill out field C and then press next"
Now there's an interesting idea, have an LLM crawl their entire docs and cull everything obvious or content free and compile what's left
Fun times.
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).
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...
I think Cognito is actually one of the few with absolutely no path to achieving this.
Disclosure: working for Ory.
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.
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.
I really don't see any reason to be using Cognito in $currentyear.
Disclosure: working for Ory.
Given all the pain I've suffered working with both cognito and auth0, I can't imagine a reason for using either in $currentyear.
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.
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.
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.
Cognito is a pain, but it mostly works once you get through their horrible docs.
Auth0 is a vendor locked PoS with a very aggressive sales team.
if you want hosted setups - FusionAuth, Stytch etc.
if you work in a mainstream language/framework - some excellent libraries eg in ruby authentication-zero, in js - BetterAuth, Django-all-auth.
for AWS as well - use their solutions where you don't need to read a lot of docs.
One big pro about cognito.. can't beat the price.
Then they figured out that their cost projection was actually off by an order of magnitude. And also kept getting bitten by peripheral systems newly getting out of sync.
And so then, they embarked upon the journey to roll it all back...
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.
On another project people didn't get this advice and we spent a two weeks working around the limitations to scrap it eventually.
We mainly choose it because AWS was used anyway and the security aspect seemed to be solved entierly with this coice (if aws get's hacked ... ).
We regretted it out of similar reasons.
Once you add in product decision making, like how to make the dev experience good on something with alot of user flows (like cognito), the products are shit.
Nowadays I can't imagine using a 3rd-party for something like auth (or many other things) due to lock-in and also just always needing to conform to their way of doing things.
Apologies for the non-sequitur but 2 days ago I saw FreshDesk had deleted my account (free plan) that I had been using (sparingly, <50 tickets total if I had to guess) for 3+ years. No email, no notice, just deleted my account and broke the sites that I had integrated their feedback widget into. I reached out to see what was going on and they pretty much told me I had to upgrade if I wanted my account back.
Now 1-2 years ago I would have considered paying. In fact I would have considered paying IF they had contacted me to say "pay up or we will delete" but the fact they deleted it without any contact meant FreshDesk was dead to me. I started, for all of 1 minute, to consider the alternatives before I fired up Claude and in <2hrs I had a full replacement for all the parts of FreshDesk I was using (basic ticketing, emails, statuses, file upload).
The build-vs-buy decision has completely flipped for me. I have a hard time thinking of paying for something my platform depends on, especially auth, when it's so easy to build it now.
Side Note: that "all-in" AWS project? Yeah, with Claude's help I'm off 90% of the AWS's services and while it's still hosted there I can move to any VPS if I want now that I've removed my dependencies on AWS-specific concepts. It's been glorious and it has the side effect of meaning my local dev more-closely matches the deployed code since there isn't AWS-magic I have to fake anymore.
Hacker News is ready for something besides "flag," because it's very frustrating to have so much LLM-generated noise clogging up /classic.
Yes, Cognito is a mess. But why can't you write about it in your own voice? Hope the clicks and SEO juice was worth insulting your readers' limited time, Josh Karamuth.
Linux/BSD as the identity/runtime layer, SSH is the protocol boundary, and your web backend is the command gateway.
8/10 times, you don't need these 3rd party providers. Yes, someone is going to tell me all about the SSOs, SCIMs, Audit Logs etc etc but the point is that 8/10 applications are simple enough to build their own Auth. The rest, go for these services. I never understood the appeal of these 3rd party providers who can hold you hostage just for your users to login ? In 2026 ? I don't get it. May be I am dumb.
It's super powerful and can do whatever you want it to do (at least if you are comfortable writing Java SPI). But there's a lot of knowledge of how to set things up that takes time and is not readily acquired.
For the record we looked at Ory early on, but it was not mature enough and didn't offer a full IdP stack at the time. We've since looked again and found there to be some conventions around how it works that made it hard for us to consider migrating from Keycloak.
Personally I choose Keycloak, but Ory is not a bad choice at all if you are willing to do more upfront work.
This may now mean something along the lines of "struggling to grind through..." but is based on the original meaning of having sex without a condom, typically with misogynist overtones. You might want to avoid it for this style of writing and audience.
After working through a few transitions to/from Auth0 that is something I never ever want to do again at scale.
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...
There’s the basic infrastructure we know and love like S3, EC2, etc.
There’s the higher level but still basic stuff that just makes a lot of sense. I like ECS + Fargate, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS.
And then there are the tarpits. CloudFormation. Cognito. Step Functions. API Gateway. They do something useful (otherwise why would they exist?) but the main point of their existence seems to be to trap you in AWS, and the fact that they solve a problem seems secondary. Some of them are cheap (CloudFormation is free!) but in general they seem like expensive alternatives to simpler, cheaper solutions.
The really nightmarish ones are the likes of CodeStar, AppRunner, Directory Service, CodeCatalyst, and 90% of anything under the Systems Manager heading. Things that tend to be glued together from multiple lower-level services with a sprinkling of vendor lock-in on top.
And yet, I often think this about things which still suck even though AI is good at them. Like why is Siri so bad still. Why do so many basic things in windows 11 not work, like folder search? Why does Altium or anything by Xilinx always have outdated docs that refer to menus that dont exist anymore?
You'd think making AI do the annoying integration work would mean less complaints about terrible docs and API.
Like how scammers put in typos
Why use AWS for any size company?
There are lots of good options out there that enterprisey abominations.
I know because this is what my brain dead principal engineer did and I’ve spent the last 3 years chasing RFCs and am now going to spend the next year migrating to Keycloak because I’ve finally convinced my boss that we’re not an auth company.
The number of compromises something like Cognito requires are just not worth the perceived gains.
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how this stuff works. You can't "just use a library". Your identity server is a service, open source or not and you have to align to how they do things.
I've set up email/password, email magic links, SMS 2FA codes, OAuth, and it's never been this magical, mystical thing these "auth providers" want to pretend it is.
Yes, you need to wire up endpoint for you to feed data to the library (tokens), and provide ways to refresh tokens, etc but that's all just wiring up and I don't think that's really that hard (even before LLMs).
I just cannot fathom handing over as much control and third-party auth providers require you to.