AWS Neptune is a graph database service that is fast, dependable, and fully managed, making it simple to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets. AWS Neptune is built around a purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine that is optimized for storing billions of relationships and querying the graph in milliseconds.
With reading replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across Availability Zones, AWS Neptune is highly available.
In this blog, we will be discussing AWS Neptune-
- What is AWS Neptune?
- Working of AWS Neptune
- Features
- Benefits
- Backup And Restore Overview
- Use Cases
- Security
- Pricing
- Frequently Asked Questions
What is AWS Neptune?
AWS Neptune is designed to provide greater than 99.99% availability, increasing database performance and availability by tightly integrating the database engine with an SSD-backed virtualized storage layer purpose-built for database workloads. AWS Neptune’s storage is fault-tolerant and self-healing and disc failures are repaired in the background without affecting database availability. Neptune is designed to detect database crashes and restart without the need for crash recovery or rebuilding the database cache.
If the entire instance fails, Neptune will switch to one of up to 15 read replicas. With a few clicks in the Neptune Management Console, you can quickly launch an AWS Neptune database instance. Neptune automatically scales storage by increasing storage and rebalancing I/Os to provide consistent performance without the need for over-provisioning.
Working of AWS Neptune-
Features-
High Performance and Scalability- Amazon Neptune is a high-performance graph database engine designed specifically for Amazon. Neptune stores and navigates graph data efficiently, and it employs a scale-up, in-memory optimized architecture to enable fast query evaluation over large graphs.
High Availability and Durability- Your Amazon Neptune database and its underlying EC2 instance’s health are constantly monitored. If the instance that powers your database fails, the database and its associated processes are restarted automatically.
(Video) Introduction to Amazon Neptune–Graph DatabaseOpen Graph APIs- Neptune allows you to create fast Gremlin traversals over property graphs quickly. Existing Gremlin applications can easily incorporate Neptune by modifying the Gremlin service configuration to point to a Neptune instance.
Highly Secure- Amazon Neptune is hosted in Amazon VPC, which allows you to isolate your database within your own virtual network and connect to your on-premises IT infrastructure via industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPNs.
Fully Managed- Amazon Neptune makes it simple to run a high-performance graph database. Neptune eliminates the need to create custom indexes over your graph data. Neptune has timeout and memory usage limits to mitigate the impact of queries that consume too many resources.
- Fast Parallel Bulk Data Loading- For Property Graph data stored in S3, Amazon Neptune supports fast, parallel bulk loading. You can specify the S3 location for the data using a REST interface. It loads data into the Nodes and Edges using a CSV delimited format.
- Cost-effectiveness– Amazon Neptune requires no upfront investment; you simply pay an hourly fee for each instance that you launch. You can also easily delete a Neptune database instance when you’re finished with it.
Benefits-
- Supports open graph APIs- Amazon Neptune supports both Gremlin and SPARQL open graph APIs and provides high performance for both graph models and query languages.
- High performance and scalability- Amazon Neptune is a high-performance graph database designed specifically for Amazon. To scale read capacity and execute more than 100,000 graph queries per second, Neptune supports up to 15 low latency read replicas distributed across three Availability Zones.
- High availability and durability- Amazon Neptune is highly available, long-lasting, and ACID compliant (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability). Neptune is built to provide greater than 99.99% uptime.
- Highly secure- Amazon Neptune offers multiple levels of security for your database, including network isolation via Amazon VPC, IAM authentication for endpoint access, and HTTPS encrypted client connections.
- Fully managed- You don’t have to worry about database management tasks like hardware provisioning, software patching, setup, configuration, or backups with Amazon Neptune.
Backup And Restore Overview-
- Neptune Backups- Neptune automatically backups up your cluster volume and retains restore data for the duration of the backup retention period. Neptune backups are continuous and incremental, allowing you to convert to any point during the backup retention period.
- Backup metrics- To review and monitor the amount of storage used by your Neptune backups, you can use the Amazon CloudWatch metrics TotalBackupStorageBilled, SnapshotStorageUsed, and BackupRetentionPeriodStorageUsed.
- Restoring data- You can recover your data by creating a new Neptune DB cluster from the backup data that Neptune keeps or from a saved DB cluster snapshot. Because Neptune backups are continuous and incremental during the backup retention period, you don’t need to take frequent snapshots of your data to improve restore times.
- Backup window in Neptune- Backups are performed automatically on a daily basis during the backup window of choice. If the backup takes longer than the backup window allows, it will continue after the window closes until it is completed. The backup window cannot overlap with the DB instance’s weekly maintenance window.
Use cases of AWS Neptune-
- Social Networking- To build social networking applications, Amazon Neptune can quickly and efficiently process large sets of user-profiles and interactions. For example, if you are incorporating a social feed into your application, you can use Neptune to provide results that prioritize showing your users the most recent updates from their family, friends whose updates they ‘Like,’ and friends who live nearby.
- Recommendation Engines- Amazon Neptune enables you to store relationships between information in a graph, such as customer interests, friends, and purchase history, and quickly query it to make personalized and relevant recommendations. For example, you can use Neptune to make product recommendations to a user based on which products are purchased by others who follow the same sport and have similar purchase histories.
- Fraud Detection- You can use Amazon Neptune to process financial and purchase transactions in near real-time to detect fraud patterns. If you are developing a retail fraud detection application, Neptune can assist you in creating graph queries to detect relationship patterns such as multiple people associated with the same personal email address or multiple people sharing the same IP address but residing in different physical addresses.
- Knowledge Graphs- You can use a knowledge graph to store information in a graph model and use graph queries to help your users navigate highly connected datasets. If a user is interested in The Mona Lisa, you can help them discover other works of art by Leonardo da Vinci or other works of art in The Louvre.
- Life Sciences-Amazon Neptune enables you to create applications that store and navigate information in the life sciences, as well as easily process sensitive data using encryption at rest. Neptune, for example, can be used to store disease and gene interaction models and to search for graph patterns within protein pathways to find other genes that may be associated with a disease.
- Network / IT Operations- If you detect an anomalous event, you can use Neptune to quickly understand how it might affect your network by querying for a graph pattern using the event’s attributes. For example, if you detect a malicious file on a host, Neptune can assist you in tracing it back to the original host that downloaded it.
Security in AWS Neptune-
AWS prioritizes cloud security above all else. As an AWS customer, you have access to a data center and network architecture designed to meet the needs of the most security-conscious organizations.
- Security of the cloud – AWS is in charge of safeguarding the infrastructure that enables AWS services to be delivered in the AWS Cloud. AWS also provides you with security services. As part of AWS compliance programs, third-party auditors test and verify the effectiveness of our security on a regular basis.
- Security in the cloud – The AWS service that you use determines your responsibility. Other factors, such as the sensitivity of your data, your company’s requirements, and applicable laws and regulations, are also your responsibility.
This document explains how to use the shared responsibility model with Neptune. The topics that follow will show you how to configure Neptune to meet your security and compliance goals. You will also learn how to use additional AWS services to monitor and secure your Neptune resources.
Amazon Neptune pricing-
- Amazon Neptune is a fast, dependable, and fully managed graph database service that makes it simple to create and run applications that work with highly connected datasets for use cases like identity graphs, knowledge graphs, and fraud detection.
- There are no long-term commitments or up-front fees with Amazon Neptune. When you use On-Demand instances, you pay for your database by the hour.
- This relieves you of the costs and complexities associated with planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware, and converts what are typically large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs.
- Pricing for primary instances, which are used for read-write workloads, and Amazon Neptune replicas, which are used to scale reads and improve failover, are the same.
- Multi-AZ deployments cost nothing more than the cost of the primary instance plus the cost of each Neptune replica. We recommend putting at least one replica in a different Availability Zone than the primary instance to maximize availability.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q1. What popular graph query languages does Amazon Neptune support?
Ans. Neptune supports both the open source Apache TinkerPop Gremlin graph traversal language and the Resource Description Framework’s (RDF) SPARQL query language, both of which are W3C standards.
Q2.Why are Amazon RDS permissions and resources required to use Amazon Neptune?
Ans. Amazon Neptune is a high-performance graph database engine designed specifically for Amazon. Neptune uses operational technology shared with Amazon RDS for certain management features such as instance lifecycle management, encryption-at-rest with Amazon Key Management Service (KMS) keys, and security groups management.
Q3. Is Amazon Neptune built on a relational database?
Ans. No, Amazon Neptune is a high-performance graph database engine designed specifically for Amazon. Neptune stores and navigates graph data efficiently, and it employs a scale-up, in-memory optimized architecture to enable fast query evaluation over large graphs.
Q4. What are the minimum and maximum storage limits of an Amazon Neptune database?
Ans.The minimum storage capacity is 10GB. Your Amazon Neptune storage will automatically grow up to 64 TB in 10GB increments based on your database usage, with no impact on database performance. There is no need to plan ahead of time for storage.
Related Links/References
- AWS Free Tier Limits
- AWS Free Tier Account Details
- How to create a free tier account in AWS
- AWS Free Tier Account Services
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