instead of having to worry about building and managing a backend solution to handle identity management, network state, storage, and sync.
From my reading of this, this wouldn't in any way obviate the need for a backend system of your own. It just does the identity management, network state, storage and sync parts for you. Your own business logic on your own backend can use this to jump start you.
> Building the backend... is a lot of work. You have to build it, deploy it, and manage the infrastructure that it runs on."
To me, it certainly sounds like they're trying to market this as an alternative to having your own backend system.
And to be perfectly honest, if you do use your own backend system for anything, authentication and simple data storage are not hard to add - especially if you're going to use a SSO service like Amazon, Facebook, or Google (which Cognito uses). There are drop-in solutions for most of those things that require little more than a couple lines of app code to authenticate users. I really just have a hard time seeing the value in what Cognito offers.
Also, assuming you do just use Cognito for the auth and storage/sync parts, how do you plan to use that data in the rest of your backend system? Are you going to pull down all that data from Amazon's servers just to do what you need with it (will they even offer that ability)? If so, how do you make sure the rest of your backend infrastructure stays in sync with Amazon's user data? It just sounds like it creates a lot more complexity than actually solving anything (except in the most basic scenarios without a need for a separate backend system).
instead of having to worry about building and managing a backend solution to handle identity management, network state, storage, and sync.
From my reading of this, this wouldn't in any way obviate the need for a backend system of your own. It just does the identity management, network state, storage and sync parts for you. Your own business logic on your own backend can use this to jump start you.