What is Amazon Neptune? Amazon Neptune Review, Features

Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, and fully managed graph database service that makes it easy for you to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets.

About Amazon Neptune

At the core of Amazon Neptune is a purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine that is optimized to store billions of relationships and reduce graph query latency to milliseconds. Amazon Neptune supports the popular graph models Property Graph and W3C's RDF and their associated query languages ​​Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL, making it easy for you to build queries to efficiently navigate highly connected datasets. Neptune supports graph use cases such as recommendation engines, fraud detection, knowledge graphs, drug development, and network security.

Amazon Neptune is highly available and provides read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across availability zones. Neptune is secure, supporting HTTPS encrypted client connections and encryption at rest. Neptune is fully managed, so you never have to worry about database management tasks such as hardware provisioning, software patching, setup, configuration, or backups.

Advantages

1. Support open graphics API

Amazon Neptune supports the open graph APIs of Gremlin and SPARQL and provides high performance for these graph models and their query languages. With Amazon Neptune, you can choose between the property graph model and its open source query language Apache TinkerPop Gremlin or the W3C standard Resource Description Framework (RDF) model and its standard query language SPARQL.

2. High performance and high scalability

Amazon Neptune is a purpose-built, high-performance graph database. It is optimized for processing graph queries. Neptune supports up to 15 low-latency read replicas across three availability zones, scaling read capacity and executing over 100,000 graph queries per second. You can easily scale your database deployment up and down as your needs change, including from smaller to larger instance types.

3. High availability and durability

Amazon Neptune is highly available, durable, and ACID compliant. Neptune is designed to provide more than 99.99% availability. Its storage system is fault-tolerant and self-healing, built for the cloud, and can replicate six copies of data across three availability zones. Neptune continuously backs up your data to Amazon S3 and recovers from physical storage failures in a transparent manner. For high availability, instance failover typically takes less than 30 seconds.

4. High security

Amazon Neptune provides multiple levels of security for your database, including network isolation using Amazon VPC, IAM authentication for endpoint access, HTTPS encrypted client connections, and encryption of static data using keys that you create and control through AWS Key Management Service (KMS). On an encrypted Neptune instance, data in the underlying storage is encrypted, as are automatic backups, snapshots, and replicas in the same cluster.

5. Fully managed

With Amazon Neptune, you don't have to worry about database management tasks such as hardware provisioning, software patching, setup, configuration, or backups. Neptune automatically and continuously monitors your database and backs it up to Amazon S3, so you can achieve granular point-in-time recovery. You can monitor database performance using Amazon CloudWatch.

Use Cases

1. Social Networks

Amazon Neptune makes it easy to quickly and easily process large volumes of user profiles and interactions to build social network applications. Neptune enables highly interactive graph queries at high throughput, bringing social capabilities to your applications.

2. Recommendation Engine

With Amazon Neptune, you can store relationships between information such as customer interests, friends, and purchase history in a graph and quickly query the graph to make personalized and relevant recommendations.

3. Fraud Detection

With Amazon Neptune, you can use relationships to process financial and purchase transactions in near real time, making it easy to detect fraud patterns. Neptune provides a fully managed service to perform fast graph queries to detect if a potential purchaser is using the same email address and credit card as a known fraud case.

4. Knowledge Graph

Amazon Neptune helps you build knowledge graph applications. With a knowledge graph, you can store information in a graph model and use graph queries to enable users to easily navigate highly interconnected data sets. Neptune supports open source and open standard APIs so that you can quickly use existing information resources to build a knowledge graph and host it on a fully managed service.

5. Life Sciences

Amazon Neptune helps you build applications that store and navigate information in the life sciences and easily handle sensitive data using encryption at rest.

6. Network/IT Operations

You can use Amazon Neptune to store a graph of your network and use graph queries to answer questions such as how many hosts are running a specific application. Neptune can store and process billions of events to manage and secure your network.

Pricing

1. On-Demand Instance Pricing

With On-Demand Instances, you pay for your database by the hour, with no long-term commitments or upfront payments. This eliminates the cost and complexity of planning and purchasing database capacity until the need arises. On-Demand pricing lets you pay only when you need it, and is ideal for development, testing, and other short-term workloads.

2. Database storage space and I/O

Storage used by Amazon Neptune databases is billed in increments of GB per month, and I/O used is billed in increments of million requests. You only pay for the storage and I/O used by your Neptune database, and you don’t need to provision any in advance.

3. Backup storage

Backup storage for Amazon Neptune refers to the storage associated with your automated database backups and any customer-initiated DB cluster snapshots. Increasing your backup retention period or taking DB cluster snapshots increases the backup storage used.

4. Data Transmission

The following pricing is based on the amount of data transferred "into" and "out of" Amazon Neptune.