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R&D

Final Misc Services — Cognito, Secrets Manager, Beanstalk, Lightsail, Route 53 Policies, CloudWatch Logs

Cognito — auth for YOUR app’s users

Section titled “Cognito — auth for YOUR app’s users”
IAM     = who uses AWS console/API (your team)
Cognito = who uses YOUR app (customers: signup/login/social/MFA)


= Firebase Auth for AWS — similar to Auth0, Clerk, Keycloak
Two parts:
  User Pools = signup/login (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, social login)
  Identity Pools = temporary AWS creds for authenticated users (S3/DynamoDB access)

Secrets Manager — the .env replacement

Section titled “Secrets Manager — the .env replacement”
  • DB passwords, API keys stored encrypted (KMS underneath), auto-rotation
  • vs SSM Parameter Store: free, no rotation, config values
  • vs KMS: KMS = keys; Secrets Manager = secrets (uses KMS)

Elastic Beanstalk — PaaS (Heroku-like)

Section titled “Elastic Beanstalk — PaaS (Heroku-like)”
  • Upload code → AWS provisions EC2 + LB + ASG + monitoring automatically
  • BUT the resources underneath are VISIBLE + editable (unlike Heroku/Vercel fully-hidden)
  • Cloudflare Workers/Vercel = serverless edge functions (even more abstract)
  • vs CloudFormation: CF = write infra templates; EB = give code, standard infra auto-built

Lightsail — simple VPS (HostVDS / DigitalOcean-like)

Section titled “Lightsail — simple VPS (HostVDS / DigitalOcean-like)”
  • Fixed monthly bundles (instance + storage + bandwidth)
  • No VPC/IAM complexity — for small projects, blogs, beginners
  • vs EC2: full control/complexity vs flat-rate simple

Route 53 routing policies (beyond basic DNS)

Section titled “Route 53 routing policies (beyond basic DNS)”
Simple      = one record → one IP
Weighted    = split % traffic (A/B testing)
Latency     = route to lowest-latency region
Geolocation = route by geography (compliance/content)
Failover    = primary → backup on health check fail
Multivalue  = multiple healthy IPs returned

CloudWatch Logs — central log store

Section titled “CloudWatch Logs — central log store”
  • App logs (EC2 agent, Lambda auto-captured) + AWS service logs (VPC flow, API GW, RDS)
  • One searchable place: Log Groups → Log Streams, Logs Insights queries
  • Metric filters (log pattern → metric → alarm), subscription → Lambda
  • Retention: 1 day - 10 years configurable
Section titled “Related”
  • [[aws/index]]
  • [[aws/iam-basics/index]]
  • [[aws/networking-basics/index]]
  • [[aws/management-services/index]]