AWS Neptune Preview — Amazon’s Graph Database Service

At the AWS DC Meetup we organized last week, we got a preview of AWS Neptune, Amazon’s new managed graph database service. It was announced at AWS re:Invent 2017, is currently in preview and will launch for general availability this summer.

What is a graph database?

A graph database is a database optimized to store and process highly connected data — in short, it’s about relationships. The data structure for these databases consists of vertices and direct links called edges.

Use cases for such highly-connected data include social networking, restaurant recommendations, retail fraud detection, knowledge graphs, life sciences, and network & IT ops. For a restaurant recommendations use case, for example, you may be interested in the relationships between various users, where those users live, what types of restaurants those users like, where the restaurants are located, what sort of cuisine they serve, and more. With a graph database, you can use the relationships between these data points to provide contextual restaurant recommendations to users.

Tired of SQL?

If you’re tired of SQL, AWS Neptune may be for you. A graph database is fundamentally different from SQL. There are no tables, columns, or rows — it feels like a NoSQL database. There are only two data types: vertices and edges, both of which have properties stored as key-value pairs.

AWS Neptune is fully managed, which means that database management tasks like hardware provisioning, software patching, setup, configuration, and backups are taken care of for you.

It’s also highly available and shows up in multiple availability zones. This is very similar to Aurora, the relational database from Amazon, in its architecture and availability.

Neptune supports Property Graph and W3C’s RDF. You can use these to build your own web of data sets that you care about, and build networks across the data sets in the way that makes sense for your data, not with arbitrary presets. You can do this using the graph models’ query languages: Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL.

There is no cost to use Neptune during the preview period. Once it’s generally available, pricing will rely on On Demand EC2 instances — which means ParkMyCloud will be looking into ways to assist Neptune users with cost control.

If you’re interested in the new service, you can check out more about AWS Neptune and sign up for the preview.

Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on February 13, 2018.