Amazon Cognito Adds Multi-Region Replication for Enhanced Resilience
Amazon Cognito now offers multi-Region replication for user identity data, enabling synchronization to a secondary user pool in a standby region. This feature enhances the resilience of authentication systems by allowing failover during regional service disruptions, ensuring continuous user access and authentication. It is available as an add-on for Essentials or Plus feature tiers in various AWS Regions.
Key Takeaways
- Amazon Cognito replicates user and machine identity data to a designated standby Region in near real-time.
- Failover to a secondary user pool allows signed-in users to maintain access without re-authenticating.
- All authentication methods, including username/password, social federation, SAML/OIDC providers, and machine-to-machine flows, function in the secondary Region.
- Multi-Region replication is offered as an add-on for user pools on Essentials or Plus feature tiers.
- The feature is available across various AWS Regions, including US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (N. California, Oregon), and several in Asia Pacific, Canada, Europe, and South America.
Why It Matters
This enhancement significantly improves the resilience of authentication systems for streaming platforms reliant on Amazon Cognito, minimizing user disruption during regional outages. By enabling seamless failover, AWS addresses a critical need for business continuity in a distributed cloud environment, benefiting global streaming services. Going forward, watch for adoption rates among major streaming providers and any subsequent announcements from competing identity providers regarding similar multi-region capabilities.
Additional Context
AWS announced multi-Region replication for Amazon Cognito on June 4, 2026, alongside support for customer-managed KMS keys for encryption (per AWS News Blog, June 2026). This update directly addresses previous challenges, where engineering teams building highly available authentication systems in Cognito frequently constructed custom replication solutions using Lambda triggers and DynamoDB Global Tables. Such bespoke setups often led to users experiencing forced password resets during regional failovers, and machine-to-machine clients required manual reconfiguration in secondary regions (per dev.to, June 2026). The new built-in multi-Region replication automatically synchronizes user profiles, credentials, MFA secrets, and pool configurations from primary to secondary regions. It also ensures both regions recognize tokens issued by either, preserving active sessions. The feature supports all authentication methods, including social federation, SAML, OIDC, and M2M OAuth2 flows (per dev.to, June 2026). While the primary user pool remains the authoritative source for administrative and write operations, the secondary operates in read-only mode, handling authentication. Crucially, operations like new user registration or profile updates are unavailable during failover (per Amazon Cognito Developer Guide, June 2026). This development allows for more robust disaster recovery without the operational overhead of managing complex replication logic, particularly beneficial for customers in regulated industries requiring greater control over data encryption.
Read full article at aws.amazon.com
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