Amazon Neptune Cheat Sheet

• Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service used for building applications that work with highly connected datasets.
• Optimized for storing billions of relationships between pieces of information.

• Provide milliseconds latency when querying the graph.
• Neptune supports graph query languages like openCypher, Apache TinkerPop Gremlin, and W3C’s SPARQL.

How it works

Common Use Cases

• Social Networking
  • Amazon Neptune can easily process user’s interactions like comments, follows, and likes in a social network application through highly interactive queries.
• Recommendation Engines
  • You can use Amazon Neptune to build applications for suggesting personalized and relevant products based on relationships between information such as customer’s interest and purchase history.
• Knowledge Graphs
  • With the help of Amazon Neptune, you can create a knowledge graph for search engines that will enable users to quickly discover new information. 
• Identity Graphs
  • You can use Amazon Neptune as a graph database to easily link and update user profile data for ad-targeting, personalization, and analytics. 

Deployment

1. Amazon Neptune Database (Standard)

   • Serverless: Automatically scales compute and memory capacity in fine-grained increments (Neptune Capacity Units, or NCUs) based on workload demand. Ideal for unpredictable or variable workloads.
   • Provisioned: You manually select the instance type and size, suitable for steady-state workloads with predictable resource needs.

2. Amazon Neptune Analytics

   • A fully managed analytics database engine optimized for fast analysis of large volumes of graph data.
   • In-Memory: Stores the entire graph in memory for rapid execution of complex graph analytics algorithms.
   • Vector Search: Supports vector search operations, enabling capabilities for Generative AI and similarity search use cases.

Neptune Database vs. Neptune Analytics

• Primary Workload:
  • Neptune Database: Optimized for transactional (OLTP) graph workloads requiring high concurrency and transactional consistency (e.g., retrieving a user’s profile or updating relationships).
  • Neptune Analytics: Optimized for analytical (OLAP) graph workloads that involve scanning large portions of the graph or running complex algorithms (e.g., community detection, fraud ring analysis, vector similarity search).
• Architecture:
  • Neptune Database: Decouples compute and storage, allowing independent scaling.
  • Neptune Analytics: Uses an in-memory engine to accelerate analysis of large graphs.
• Query Languages:
  • Neptune Database: Supports Gremlin, SPARQL, and openCypher.
  • Neptune Analytics: Currently supports openCypher.
• Data Latency:
  • Neptune Database: Delivers millisecond latency for transactional queries.
  • Neptune Analytics: Designed to analyze tens of billions of relationships and return analytical results in seconds.

Amazon Neptune Performance

• Supports 15 read replicas and 100,000s of queries per second.
• Amazon Neptune uses query optimization for both SPARQL queries and Gremlin traversals.
  

Reliability

• Database volume is replicated six ways across three availability zones.
• Global Database:
  • You can span a single Neptune database across multiple AWS Regions. It consists of one primary cluster and up to five secondary clusters (read-only) in other regions. This enables low-latency global reads and disaster recovery.
• Amazon Neptune can withstand a loss of up to two copies of data and three copies of data without affecting write availability and read availability respectively.
• Amazon Neptune’s storage is self-healing. Data blocks are continuously scanned for errors and replaced automatically.
• Amazon Neptune uses asynchronous replication to update the changes made to the primary instance to all of Neptune’s read replicas.
• Replicas can act as a failover target with no data loss.
• Supports automatic failover.
• Supports promotion priority within a cluster. Amazon Neptune will promote the replica with the highest priority tier to primary when the primary instance fails.
  

Backup And Restore

• Automated backups are always enabled.
• Supports Point-In-Time restoration, which can be up to 5 minutes in the past.
• Supports sharing of encrypted manual snapshots.

Amazon Neptune Security

• Amazon Neptune supports AWS Key Management Service ( KMS ) encryption at rest.
• It also supports HTTPS connection. Neptune enforces a minimum version of TLS v1.2 and SSL client connections to Neptune in all AWS Regions where Neptune is available.
• To encrypt an existing Neptune instance, you should create a new instance with encryption enabled and migrate your data into it.
• You can create custom endpoints for Amazon Neptune to access your workload. Custom endpoints allow you to distribute your workload across a designated set of instances within a Neptune cluster.
• Offers database deletion protection.

Amazon Neptune Pricing

• You are billed based on the DB instance hours, I/O requests, storage, and Data transfer.
• Storage rate and I/O rate is billed in per GB-month increments and per million request increments respectively.

Amazon Neptune Monitoring

• Visualize your graph using the Neptune Workbench.
• You can receive event notifications on your Amazon Neptune DB clusters, DB instances, DB cluster snapshots, parameter groups, or security groups through Amazon SNS.

Amazon Neptune Limitations

• Global Database Limitations:
  • While Neptune supports Global Databases (cross-region), you typically cannot have a Global Database that spans different AWS partitions.
• Encryption of an existing Neptune instance is not supported.
• Sharing of automatic DB snapshots to other accounts is not allowed. A workaround for this is to manually copy the snapshot from the automatic snapshot, then, copy the manual snapshot to another account.
  

Note: If you are studying for the AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate exam, we highly recommend that you take our AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate Practice Exams and read our Data Engineer Associate exam study guide.

Amazon Neptune Cheat Sheet Resource:

https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/