Does AWS Cognito remove the need for a 'users' table in my database?

Question

With AWS Cognito doing its thing with authentication does this mean I no longer need a traditional 'users' table in my database?

Currently the app I have inherited has the traditional 'users' table I reference with sql queries looking for many-to-many and many-to-one joins with organisation, message boards, etc tables.

Do I query the Cognito user groups (that feels wrong) or is there some 'sync' method to have an updated 'users' table in my database.

Reading to docs and watching a few tutorials is great but no one seams to do more than authenticate. Where is the authorisation, and getting user names, email with join queries.

Be gentle, trying to work and study with a new baby in the room

Answer 1

My experience has been it does not obsolete the need for a users table, for a couple of reasons.

1. I would routinely run into AWS throttling errors when invoking the Cognito getUser/listUser methods while using Cognito as the primary user data store. AWS support would increase the API limits on our account but I was always worried they would reappear.
2. You are essentially limited to querying users by username/email/phone. The listUser method is very limited for searching
3. If you want to store other user data then you have to put them in custom Cognito attributes and managing those got tiresome quickly

The design I ended up on was to set a post-confirmation trigger on the Cognito user pool and have it copy all the user data into a relational database or DynamoDB when a user signed up. The primary key of the users table would be the Cognito username so if necessary I could lookup the user in both the database and Cognito. Basically I just use Cognito for authentication and not as a primary user database

Answer 2

You can certainly use Cognito User Pools service to manage authentication instead of your 'user' table, but not necessarily. You can also integrate other identity providers and login with Twitter, Amazon, etc, or even your own database. A benefit of using Cognito User Pools is that you don't have to code the authentication flows, as they are implemented by the service correctly and securely.

Best of luck with the code and the baby!