AWS Cognito - User Pool Federation vs Identity Pool Federation

Question

Question

Why AWS Cognito has two places to federate Identity Providers? I think Identity Pool is supposed to be federated with identity providers and wonder why User P

Answer 1

The Main Difference is how users are saved and what permissions are granted once they signin with idp's using user pool vs identity pool.

So, Federation through User Pool (by themselves) don’t deal with permissions at the IAM-level which doesn't allow for a much more granular set of permissions, with respect to AWS services.

However Identity Pools creates a user from an Identity Provider with unique identities such as an IAM role, they essentially allow you to delegate authorization for AWS resources to AWS itself.

Refer here for scenarios!!

A similar source of confusion is caused by the fact that you can integrate external social providers like Facebook and Google with User Pools directly, without using Federated Identities at all. Using this approach, users can sign up and sign in to your app with their Facebook login, but they never get assigned an IAM role. Instead, the User Pool service automatically assigns these users to a Facebook group, and then maps the attributes of their Facebook profile (e.g. name, email, location) to the user attributes you’ve defined in your User Pool. Again, the key distinction here is not whether the Identity Provider is internal or external, but rather if an IAM role is assigned to the user after authentication.

Hope it Helps.