Managing users in your user pool

After you create a user pool, you can create, confirm, and manage user accounts. With Amazon Cognito user pools groups you can manage your users and their access to resources by mapping IAM roles to groups.

Managing users in your Amazon Cognito user pool involves a variety of configuration options and administrative tasks. User pools can scale to millions of users. A user directory of this scale requires equally scalable and repeatable administrative tools. You might want to create many user profiles, manage inactive users, produce governance and compliance reports, or set up self-service tools where users do most of the work. After you create a user pool, you can control how users sign up and confirm their accounts, including requiring email or phone number verification. Administrators can also create user accounts directly and customize the welcome messages and password requirements.

User pools have user groups, where you can manage access to resources based on a user's group membership. You can assign IAM roles to these groups to manage access to Amazon Web Services services with identity pools. Users' group membership is present in both ID and access tokens. With this information, you can make access-control decisions at runtime in your application or with a policy engine like Amazon Verified Permissions.

User pools often have many users. You will frequently find yourself searching for and updating user accounts. The Amazon Cognito console and API support querying users based on standard attributes like username, email, and phone number. Administrators can also reset passwords, disable accounts, and view user event history.

For migrating existing user data, Amazon Cognito has options to import users from a CSV file and to use a Lambda trigger to automatically migrate users when they first sign in. These options support user transitions from other user directories to your user pool.

You can use the user-management features in user pools to have fine-grained control over the user lifecycle and authentication experience. The combination of self-service sign-up, admin-created accounts, groups, and migration tools makes Amazon Cognito user pools a flexible user directory.