Hey everyone! I'm part of a small team working on a mobile app for home financing. Our app helps users create profiles, go through credit evaluations with third-party integrations, and manage parts of their financing securely and compliantly. We're currently deciding on the backend and authentication setup and would really appreciate insights from anyone who has experience in this area.
Here are our priorities:
- Keeping costs low during the MVP phase.
- Minimizing data responsibility to avoid handling sensitive personal data due to GDPR.
- Ensuring the architecture is secure and scalable.
- Using a setup that our team, which primarily works with .NET and C#, is comfortable with.
We're comparing AWS (Cognito + API Gateway + Lambda + DynamoDB) and Azure (Entra ID B2C + Azure Functions + CosmosDB).
AWS seems cheaper and easier to maintain with a serverless architecture, while Azure offers strong security and better integration with Microsoft services but may also come with higher costs and complexity in setup and maintenance.
I'd love to hear your experiences:
- Have you built similar apps?
- How did you handle user authentication and third-party integrations?
- Any unexpected challenges with Cognito, Entra B2C, or Auth0?
- If you could start over, would you choose differently?
Any advice, lessons learned, or insights would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
4 Answers
Both platforms have their pros and cons, and the decision is crucial since it can be costly to switch later. I've built fintech apps on both, and while you can succeed anywhere, consulting with experts for such impactful choices is wise. It's also essential to match your team's skills with the platform you choose.
I'd recommend going with AWS. It's more developer-friendly, and the functionality is easier to navigate. Plus, there are some concerns about recent security issues with Entra.
If you need assistance setting up the right infrastructure on AWS, feel free to reach out. We have a lot of experience with similar projects!
AWS is definitely the better choice. Azure Functions and CosmosDB have major drawbacks, especially CosmosDB's partition key design, which can get really tricky. Also, B2C has been deprecated, so new customers are having a tough time trying to navigate its replacement. Just be careful with costs if you ever need to do cross-partition queries with CosmosDB — they can add up fast!

Related Questions
How To: Running Codex CLI on Windows with Azure OpenAI
Set Wordpress Featured Image Using Javascript
How To Fix PHP Random Being The Same
Why no WebP Support with Wordpress
Replace Wordpress Cron With Linux Cron
Customize Yoast Canonical URL Programmatically