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 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. 

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.
• 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

• It does not support cross-region replicas.
• 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 Database Specialty exam, we highly recommend that you take our AWS Certified Database – Specialty Practice Exams and read our Database Specialty exam study guide.

Amazon Neptune Cheat Sheet Resource:

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