AWS Cognito: What are identity pools?

Identity pools let you assign IAM roles to your app’s end users so you can determine the level of access that they have to your AWS resources (e.g., S3 buckets).

An identity pool defines two types of identities:

• Authenticated: for users who have authenticated using an authentication provider such as Cognito user pools, Google, Facebook, or your own authentication process.
• Unauthenticated: for users who haven’t authenticated.