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While this (and other similar) Backend-aaS look very appealing at first glance, it seems to suffer from the same problem as most AWS offerings - terrible platform lock-in. Show me that I could move all of this to another provider if I need to, and then we can talk seriously.

I also wonder how they "manage[s] the complexity of conflict resolution" without manual intervention.

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I'm a bit confused by your objection to "platform lock-in." Presumably a person or company who has chosen to use this service understands the technical limitations and features it entails. That includes understanding that AWS may in fact implement this service differently than other providers do and that a future move might entail some non-trivial effort. That isn't platform lock-in in any meaningful sense.

Besides, what makes you think you would be prevented from moving all this to another provider? From the FAQ (https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/faqs/), it seems that Cognito data is stored in a straight-forward Key-Value scheme. That's about as easy as it gets when it comes to data structure.

Moreover, the actual service itself would almost certainly be implemented differently with another provider. Why should Amazon, or anybody else who offers similar "menu of services" cloud computing, make it easy for you to do so (they make money off of you not moving)?

Because the best way to get a user to "move in" is to make it easy for them to "move out". It's actually in Amazon's financial interest to make it easy for people to move off of their offerings.

Bingo!

This is one of our core values and while we get odd looks from investors or MBA-types we know that it's the right move to make in the long run. This is the way things are moving and I hope that more companies will go this route.

Joel wrote about this back in 2000. Barriers to exits become their own barriers to entry. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html

The thing about casual discussions like that is it's easy to build a narrative without actually providing much substance. Joel's essay doesn't discuss Microsoft's "barrier(s) to exit" that Office itself didn't give up completely until last year (cf: Open Document), and Windows itself has yet to yield (it is still the dominant OS, by far, in the desktop and laptop markets).

Sure, "barriers to exit become barriers to entry" is applicable in some contexts, and for some part of a potential market it will be the barrier that keeps those customers away. I wouldn't dispute that. I would dispute that "barriers to exit become barriers to entry" be treated as a universal maxim applicable along all businesses and products. It's just as much of a strategy mistake to make as assuming the barrier can't exist in the first place. It ought to be considered; not treated as a key issue until or unless the data suggest it should be.

> Presumably a person or company who has chosen to use this service understands the technical limitations and features it entails.

That's a pretty big assumption to make. People, even technical people, make assumptions all the time that they'll be able to get their data out of a system and then aren't able to at a future date.

Is anyone delivering the equivalent with less lock-in? I can understand both sides of the argument but it seems that over time stuff always migrates towards more control (ie, people migrate OFF of Parse, Heroku, AWS, etc). I'd envision a much better set of images, Fabric/Chef recipes, to the point where you get your AWS but with vanilla OSS on generic hosting providers.

I'm working on this. Email in profile.

I'm trying out DreamFactory (dreamfactory.com) to see if I can accomplish the same goals but using something that's open source (Apache License). Sure I'll have to maintain my own VPS boxes but that's something I do anyway.

A couple of open source options that you can deploy to your own servers (or your cloud provider): - Apache UserGrid (incubator project) - DreamFactory - BaaSBox - LoopBack - Helios - Deployd

Any other OSS out there for this?

I'm not sure it could be considered the same thing, but by visiting the DreamFactory's site I found this in the comments http://www.wakanda.org/

Any feedback on it?

Doesn't CouchBase Mobile Sync Gateway do something similar?

Couchbase Mobile using Sync Gateway is incredibly similar to Amazon Cognito. Even the native iOS and Android libraries have a similar feel to them (object-mapping with native objective-c objects, single call sync/replication function). Sync gateway has built in support for identity providers such as Facebook, but doesn't provide Google or Amazon identity support (this could easily be added with custom server code).

The big difference I am seeing here is Amazon Cognito doesn't yet have a story around syncing documents between multiple users/roles. Sync gateway has the notion of a sync function that providers developers with a hook to customize server-side syncing in a deeper way.

I'll be interested to see how Amazon developers the multi-user/role sync capabilities and integrates it with their native identity management solution. Could be very compelling down the road..

It's the same with almost every BaaS. Do you want your data? Pay for it.

That's why I always advocate for building your own backend, if you have a long-run plan and/or expect to generate a lot of data for the app.

The trick with your suggestion of making data more portable is that if Amazon or any other platform provider would do so, then it would create a race to the bottom in terms of price. This would make the business quickly unappealing for the likes of Amazon. This is why no one will make their platform formats portable. At least not while things are in flux and the battle field is still disputed. Once the market matures (see the mobile telephony of 2000s) then you'll be able to port your phone number.

At Fanout.io (not BaaS like Cognito, but another kind of microservice) we opened everything up to make us easy to migrate off of. Why wait for the market to mature when we can do things the way customers want from the start?

See you at the race to the bottom!

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