Serverless Single Page Apps

Connecting to External Identity Providers

The identity access systems created by Google, Facebook, and other providers are (somewhat loosely) based on the OAuth2 standard, which allows web apps and other clients to gain temporary access to information via HTTP. While the standard itself has some serious problems,^[40] the implementations created by the major vendors are well understood at this point, and offer many integration opportunities.

Using Cognito to manage these interactions for us means we can avoid some of the problems of OAuth2 while still taking advantage of the benefits. First, we’ll need to get a unique identifier from the identity provider. Each provider has its own method for doing this. Once we’ve got that ID, however, we can ...