Amazon Cognito

Yesterday, Amazon announced Cognito. The similarities between Cognito and our products (EnduroSync and Identio) are striking. Including the latin sounding names and pricing.

In a head to head comparison of EnduroSync and Cognito, EnduroSync easily wins.

1. EnduroSync stores are object databases, Cognito offers a simple key/value store.
2. EnduroSync has no data size restrictions, Cognito is limited to 1M.
3. EnduroSync object stores can be shared with multiple users, or even across entire apps. Identio offers a very sophisticated permission system which allows this type of sharing.
4. EnduroSync has many more uses cases due to items 2 and 3 above. For instance, you can use EnduroSync to create and manage an object store that is shared for everyone using your app. To update every user, you only need to modify your master copy and the deltas are propagated for you.

There are many more reasons for choosing EnduroSync over Cognito. But the big question for us is can we compete head to head with Amazon even with these advantages? We can certainly outmaneuver them by adding features quicker, but is that enough?  Probably not, at least if we only offer a cloud version.

So we have decided to offer more versions of EnduroSync and Identio:

1. Open source versions. We will have open source licensing for EnduroSync and Identio (clients and servers).
2. Server versions. Instead of paying based on usage, we will offer paid AMI’s (and other options) that let you run EnduroSync and Identio on your AWS account. This will dramatically lower costs for heavy users.

The open source versions will appear on our GitHub account in the next few days. We will blog here with progress updates. Stay tuned!