Account Linking In Alexa

Question

We are building complete serverless architecture using AWS services for all of our api's (using API Gateway + Lambda functions + DynamoDB) and to control our devices we are using aws-iot platform. Mobile to devices interaction will happen over the aws-iot. On mobile side for user management we are using firebase and all business logic is in Lambda function. Now we want to work with Alexa with our existing architecture flow, but we are confused with the account linking part. Do we have to implement our own auth server which will take care of authorization part or should we move to cognito user pool + login with Amazon, so that we will have user management and auth at the same platform.

Answer 1

Yes, you usually have to set up your own oAuth 2.0 if you want to do Account Linking with a user in your system. As you mentioned, there is also the possibility to use "Login with Amazon" (LWA) which makes things a little easier. However, you will only get a user's email address and name (often, this is enough).

If you don't want to set up your own oAuth server, there are also tool providers that can do user management for you, like Auth0 . For example, Auth0 can be used to connect different identity providers like Facebook, Google logins, but also allows for username + password.

You can find a detailed step by step guide to set up Alexa Account Linking with Auth0 here . Let me know if you have any more questions!

Answer 2

The documentation states the following providers can be used for authentication Github, Facebook, Twitter, Google. I don't see how you'd be able to link in with Amazon / Alexa. Also I'm not sure why you would want to use Firebase and not AWS Cognito.