AWS Neptune is a graph database service that is fast, trustworthy, and fully managed, making it simple to design and run applications that interact with densely connected datasets. AWS Neptune is based on a purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine that is optimized for storing billions of relationships and accessing 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?
Amazon Neptune is a graph database service that is fast, dependable, and fully managed, making it simple to design and run applications that interact with densely connected datasets. Amazon Neptune is designed around a purpose-made, high-performance graph database engine that is optimized for storing billions of relationships and accessing the graph in milliseconds. Amazon Neptune supports popular graph models such as Property Graph and W3C’s RDF, as well as their query languages Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL, allowing you to simply design searches that effectively navigate massively connected datasets. Neptune is the driving force behind graph application cases such as recommendation engines, fraud detection, knowledge graphs, medication discovery, and network security.
Working of AWS Neptune-
Features-
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High Performance and Scalability- Amazon Neptune is a high-performance graph database designed from the ground up. It’s designed to handle graph queries. To extend 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. As your requirements change, you may quickly scale your database deployment from smaller to bigger instance types.
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Fully Managed-Amazon Neptune simplifies the operation of a high-performance graph database. Neptune removes the requirement for you to generate custom indexes on your graph data. To alleviate the impact of queries that consume too many resources, Neptune incorporates a timeout and memory consumption restriction.
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Open Graph APIs- Amazon Neptune supports both Gremlin and SPARQL open graph APIs and provides outstanding performance for both graph models and query languages. It allows you to choose between the Property Graph model and its open-source query language, Apache TinkerPop Gremlin, and the W3C standard Resource Description Framework (RDF) model and standard query language, SPARQL.
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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.
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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.
- 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 building a new Neptune DB cluster using backup data or a saved DB cluster snapshot. Because Neptune backups are continuous and incremental over the backup retention period, you don’t need to take regular snapshots of your data to optimize restore timings.
- 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.
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- 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:
What popular graph query languages does Amazon Neptune support?
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.
Is Amazon Neptune built on a relational database?
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.
Why are Amazon RDS permissions and resources required to use Amazon Neptune?
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.
What are the minimum and maximum storage limits of an Amazon Neptune database?
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 Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Exam
- AWS Free Tier Account Details
- How to create a free tier account in AWS
- AWS Free Tier Account Services
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional DOP-C02
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