Understanding the Differences: Cognito User Pools vs. Identity Pools

If you looked into Amazon Cognito, chances are that you have been confused by User Pools and Identity Pools (now renamed to Federated Identities). Well, Cognito is not one of the simplest AWS services to get started with but it is indeed very powerful and it can be very convenient to use when you are dealing with authentication and authorization.

In this Episode of the AWS Bites Podcast, we try to clarify what is the difference between User Pools and Identity Pools. When to use one or the other and even when to use them together. Throughout the episode, we will cover several practical examples and use cases.

In this episode, we didn’t really mention any resources, but if you want to deep dive into this topic here are some useful links:

• Our series of live streams where we also use Cognito User Pools for authentication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfRElTYilyY&list=PLAWXFhe0N1vI1_z-06EzJ22pz95_gBrId
• Our previous episode about S3 Pre-signed URLs (an alternative way to give controlled access to files on S3): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDEWH0VTudg
• Amazon Cognito, official documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/index.html

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Do you have any AWS questions you would like us to address? Leave a comment here or connect with us on Twitter: - https://twitter.com/eoins - https://twitter.com/loige