Question

I’m using Amazon Web Services for nearly everything, including their SimpleDB flat database. It’s so nice, stable, reasonably safe, etc.. The moment I begin to add Membership to my web app in .NET, it feels like I have to start becoming a fully-fledged database administrator and backup and manage a SQL database.

Is there any method for implementing username/password/login/password recovery features on my website without having to host, backup and manage a SQL server myself?

Thank you!

—UPDATE—-
Found this sample project on AWS that has the basic custom Memebership code. It’s a great start:

http://aws.amazon.com/articles/3592

Answer 1

By providing you own MembershipProvider you can abstract the data access.

There are two steps for this.

One. In web.config:

 <membership defaultProvider="MyMembershipProvider">
 <providers>
 <clear/>
 <add name="MyMembershipProvider" type="Full.Name.MyMembershipProvider" 
 more options here/>
 </providers>
 </membership>

Two. The membership class.

 public sealed class MyMembershipProvider : MembershipProvider {
    //... much more here 
    //example method:
    public override bool ChangePassword(string username, string oldPwd, string newPwd)
    {
        //access simpleDb here
    }
 }

The good news is that you have to implement only the methods you use, e.g. if you do registration through other channels then you can get away with only implementing ChangePassword, ValidateUser and Initialize.

Have a look at How to: Sample Membership Provider Implementation (for the class code)
and Sample Membership Provider Implementation (for the web.config bit).