Which AWS service is designed for user management and authentication?

Amazon Cognito is specifically designed for user management and authentication within applications. It enables developers to add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to web and mobile applications. With Cognito, you can manage user identities and synchronize user data across devices, which makes it an ideal choice for handling user authentication securely and efficiently.

Cognito supports integration with social identity providers like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, as well as with enterprise identity providers via SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language). Additionally, it provides features such as user pools for managing and storing user profiles, and identity pools for enabling access to AWS services.

In contrast, the other services mentioned serve different purposes. For example, Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service that focuses on database management rather than user authentication. AWS Step Functions is used for coordinating components of distributed applications and doesn’t deal with user accounts. Amazon EC2 provides scalable computing capacity in the cloud but is not meant for user management either, as it focuses on virtual server provisioning.