Amazon Cognito vs Vault

Overview

Amazon Cognito

Stacks616

Followers917

Votes34

Vault

Stacks816

Followers802

Votes71

GitHub Stars33.4K

Forks4.5K

Amazon Cognito vs Vault: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will explore the key differences between Amazon Cognito and Vault. Both Amazon Cognito and Vault are tools used for authentication and secure access control, but they serve different purposes in the realm of identity and access management (IAM).

Integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS): Amazon Cognito is tightly integrated with various AWS services and is designed to be used within the AWS ecosystem. It provides seamless integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda, making it an ideal choice for applications hosted on AWS. On the other hand, Vault is developed by HashiCorp and can be used across different cloud providers, allowing for more flexibility in multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments.
Identity Management Capabilities: Amazon Cognito offers comprehensive identity management capabilities, including user sign-up and sign-in, user profile management, and multi-factor authentication (MFA). It also supports social identity providers such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Vault, on the other hand, primarily focuses on secure storage and encryption of sensitive data, providing a centralized platform for storing secrets, API keys, and other credentials.
Scalability and Managed Service: Amazon Cognito is a fully managed service provided by AWS, which means it handles the infrastructure and maintenance tasks automatically. It can scale seamlessly to handle millions of users and provides built-in features like user pools and identity pools. In contrast, Vault can be deployed as a self-hosted solution and offers more flexibility in terms of customization and configuration. However, this also means that it requires manual setup, maintenance, and scaling as the user base grows.
Authentication Protocols and Standards: Amazon Cognito supports industry-standard authentication protocols like OpenID Connect (OIDC) and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), allowing seamless integration with existing identity providers and Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions. Vault, on the other hand, does not focus on authentication protocols but rather provides secure storage and encryption of secrets, making it a better fit for managing sensitive data in a secure manner.
Pricing Model: Amazon Cognito follows a usage-based pricing model, where costs are incurred based on the number of monthly active users, storage usage, and data transfer. It offers a free tier, but additional charges apply as the usage increases. Vault, on the other hand, is an open-source tool with no additional costs for usage or licensing. However, self-hosting and managing the infrastructure for Vault may incur costs for hosting and maintenance.
Ecosystem and Community Support: Amazon Cognito benefits from being part of the larger AWS ecosystem, which includes a wide range of services and integrations. It has a strong community and extensive documentation, making it easy to find resources and support. Vault, being an open-source tool, also has an active community and benefits from contributions and extensions from the user community. However, it may have a relatively smaller ecosystem compared to AWS services.

In summary, Amazon Cognito is tightly integrated with AWS services, offers comprehensive identity management capabilities, and is suitable for applications hosted on AWS. Vault, on the other hand, focuses on secure storage and encryption of sensitive data and provides flexibility across different cloud environments, with a self-hosted and customizable approach.

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Advice on Amazon Cognito, Vault

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.

297k views297k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon Cognito	Vault
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.	Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.
Manage Unique Identities;Work Offline;Store and Sync across Devices;Seamless Guest Access;Safeguard AWS Credentials;Control Access to AWS Resources	Secure Secret Storage: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored in Vault. Vault encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to access your secrets. Vault can write to disk, Consul, and more.;Dynamic Secrets: Vault can generate secrets on-demand for some systems, such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an application needs to access an S3 bucket, it asks Vault for credentials, and Vault will generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After creating these dynamic secrets, Vault will also automatically revoke them after the lease is up.;Data Encryption: Vault can encrypt and decrypt data without storing it. This allows security teams to define encryption parameters and developers to store encrypted data in a location such as SQL without having to design their own encryption methods.;Leasing and Renewal: All secrets in Vault have a lease associated with it. At the end of the lease, Vault will automatically revoke that secret. Clients are able to renew leases via built-in renew APIs.;Revocation: Vault has built-in support for secret revocation. Vault can revoke not only single secrets, but a tree of secrets, for example all secrets read by a specific user, or all secrets of a particular type. Revocation assists in key rolling as well as locking down systems in the case of an intrusion.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 33.4K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 4.5K
Stacks 616	Stacks 816
Followers 917	Followers 802
Votes 34	Votes 71
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 Hard to find expiration times for tokens/codes 1 Different Language SDKs not compatible	Pros 17 Secure 13 Variety of Secret Backends 11 Very easy to set up and use 8 Dynamic secret generation 5 AuditLog

What are some alternatives to Amazon Cognito, Vault?

Auth0

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

Stormpath

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

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 is a flexible authentication solution for Rails based on Warden

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,

WorkOS

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

Doppler

Doppler’s developer-first security platform empowers teams to seamlessly manage, orchestrate, and govern secrets at scale.

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 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.

IBM SKLM

It centralizes, simplifies and automates the encryption key management process to help minimize risk and reduce operational costs of encryption key management. It offers secure, robust key storage, key serving and key lifecycle management for IBM and non-IBM storage solutions using the OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP).

Related Comparisons

Stacks616

Followers917

Votes34

Vault

Stacks816

Followers802

Votes71

GitHub Stars33.4K

Forks4.5K

Amazon Cognito vs Vault: What are the differences?

Introduction

Integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS): Amazon Cognito is tightly integrated with various AWS services and is designed to be used within the AWS ecosystem. It provides seamless integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda, making it an ideal choice for applications hosted on AWS. On the other hand, Vault is developed by HashiCorp and can be used across different cloud providers, allowing for more flexibility in multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments.
Identity Management Capabilities: Amazon Cognito offers comprehensive identity management capabilities, including user sign-up and sign-in, user profile management, and multi-factor authentication (MFA). It also supports social identity providers such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Vault, on the other hand, primarily focuses on secure storage and encryption of sensitive data, providing a centralized platform for storing secrets, API keys, and other credentials.
Scalability and Managed Service: Amazon Cognito is a fully managed service provided by AWS, which means it handles the infrastructure and maintenance tasks automatically. It can scale seamlessly to handle millions of users and provides built-in features like user pools and identity pools. In contrast, Vault can be deployed as a self-hosted solution and offers more flexibility in terms of customization and configuration. However, this also means that it requires manual setup, maintenance, and scaling as the user base grows.
Authentication Protocols and Standards: Amazon Cognito supports industry-standard authentication protocols like OpenID Connect (OIDC) and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), allowing seamless integration with existing identity providers and Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions. Vault, on the other hand, does not focus on authentication protocols but rather provides secure storage and encryption of secrets, making it a better fit for managing sensitive data in a secure manner.
Pricing Model: Amazon Cognito follows a usage-based pricing model, where costs are incurred based on the number of monthly active users, storage usage, and data transfer. It offers a free tier, but additional charges apply as the usage increases. Vault, on the other hand, is an open-source tool with no additional costs for usage or licensing. However, self-hosting and managing the infrastructure for Vault may incur costs for hosting and maintenance.
Ecosystem and Community Support: Amazon Cognito benefits from being part of the larger AWS ecosystem, which includes a wide range of services and integrations. It has a strong community and extensive documentation, making it easy to find resources and support. Vault, being an open-source tool, also has an active community and benefits from contributions and extensions from the user community. However, it may have a relatively smaller ecosystem compared to AWS services.

Advice on Amazon Cognito, Vault

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.

297k views297k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon Cognito	Vault
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.	Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.
Manage Unique Identities;Work Offline;Store and Sync across Devices;Seamless Guest Access;Safeguard AWS Credentials;Control Access to AWS Resources	Secure Secret Storage: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored in Vault. Vault encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to access your secrets. Vault can write to disk, Consul, and more.;Dynamic Secrets: Vault can generate secrets on-demand for some systems, such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an application needs to access an S3 bucket, it asks Vault for credentials, and Vault will generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After creating these dynamic secrets, Vault will also automatically revoke them after the lease is up.;Data Encryption: Vault can encrypt and decrypt data without storing it. This allows security teams to define encryption parameters and developers to store encrypted data in a location such as SQL without having to design their own encryption methods.;Leasing and Renewal: All secrets in Vault have a lease associated with it. At the end of the lease, Vault will automatically revoke that secret. Clients are able to renew leases via built-in renew APIs.;Revocation: Vault has built-in support for secret revocation. Vault can revoke not only single secrets, but a tree of secrets, for example all secrets read by a specific user, or all secrets of a particular type. Revocation assists in key rolling as well as locking down systems in the case of an intrusion.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 33.4K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 4.5K
Stacks 616	Stacks 816
Followers 917	Followers 802
Votes 34	Votes 71
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 Hard to find expiration times for tokens/codes 1 Different Language SDKs not compatible	Pros 17 Secure 13 Variety of Secret Backends 11 Very easy to set up and use 8 Dynamic secret generation 5 AuditLog

Amazon Cognito vs Vault

Overview

Amazon Cognito vs Vault: What are the differences?