How to authenticate API Gateway calls with Facebook?

Question

Problem: I want to authorize my Amazon API Gateway hosted REST API users using Facebook Authentication.

My Understanding: I know Amazon Cognito can be used to authenticate users, calling as Federated Identities. Then, I saw Authenticate API Clients with Amazon Cognito Your User Pool, which authenticates for Cognito User Pool. I also found Use Amazon API Gateway Custom Authorizers, to use from custom authorization. But, I did not find to link API Gateway to authenticate using Cognito Federated Identities (i.e. Facebook here). Can we use same procedure as User Pool for Federated Identities as well or should I use as in Custom Authorizers ? I'm a bit confused. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in Advance.

Answer 1

Cognito federated identities and Cognito user pools address different use cases.

With Cognito user pools, you explicitly manage the users which can access your service. This is useful when you want to limit access to your API to a fixed set of users.

With Cognito federated identities, you delegate user management to an identity provider such as Facebook, Google, or Amazon. In that case, anyone with a user identity for your chosen identity provider can access your service. This is useful when you want to make your API broadly available, but still need to associate individual identities with your API users in order to manage per-user state or resources.

To use a federated identity, you set the API Gateway method to use “AWS_IAM” authorization. You use Cognito to create a role and associate it with your Cognito identity pool. You then use the Identity and Access Management (IAM) service to grant this role permission to call your API Gateway method.