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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Decisions about Amazon API Gateway and Amazon Cognito
Brent Maxwell
CEO at DEFY Labs · | 4 upvotes · 290.8K views
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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Learn MorePros of Amazon API Gateway
Pros of Amazon Cognito
Pros of Amazon API Gateway
- AWS Integration37
- Websockets7
- Serverless1
Pros of Amazon Cognito
- Backed by Amazon14
- Manage Unique Identities7
- Work Offline4
- MFA3
- Store and Sync2
- Free for first 50000 users1
- It works1
- Integrate with Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, SAML1
- SDKs and code samples1
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Cons of Amazon API Gateway
Cons of Amazon Cognito
Cons of Amazon API Gateway
- No websocket broadcast2
- Less expensive1
Cons of Amazon Cognito
- Massive Pain to get working4
- Documentation often out of date3
- Login-UI sparsely customizable (e.g. no translation)2
- Docs are vast but mostly useless1
- MFA: there is no "forget device" function1
- Difficult to customize (basic-pack is more than humble)1
- Lacks many basic features1
- There is no "Logout" method in the API1
- Different Language SDKs not compatible1
- No recovery codes for MFA1
- Hard to find expiration times for tokens/codes1
- Only paid support1
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What is Amazon API Gateway?
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.
What is Amazon Cognito?
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.
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What companies use Amazon API Gateway?
What companies use Amazon Cognito?
What companies use Amazon API Gateway?
What companies use Amazon Cognito?
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What tools integrate with Amazon API Gateway?
What tools integrate with Amazon Cognito?
What tools integrate with Amazon API Gateway?
What tools integrate with Amazon Cognito?
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What are some alternatives to Amazon API Gateway and Amazon Cognito?
Apigee
API management, design, analytics, and security are at the heart of modern digital architecture. The Apigee intelligent API platform is a complete solution for moving business to the digital world.
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.
NGINX
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.
Zuul
It is the front door for all requests from devices and websites to the backend of the Netflix streaming application. As an edge service application, It is built to enable dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, and security. Routing is an integral part of a microservice architecture.
Azure API Management
Today's innovative enterprises are adopting API architectures to accelerate growth. Streamline your work across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with a single place for managing all your APIs.