Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) has announced general availability of Amazon Neptune, a fully managed graph database service.
Amazon Neptune stores and navigates connected data, allowing developers to create sophisticated, interactive graph applications that can query billions of relationships with millisecond latency. In the preview, customers used Neptune to build social networks, recommendation engines, fraud detection, knowledge graphs, drug discovery applications, and more.
According to Amazon, while relational databases are strong choices for applications that need referential integrity for highly structured data, today’s developers need a variety of databases to serve the needs of modern applications. Just as some modern applications need to store petabytes of unstructured data, access it with sub-millisecond latency, process millions of requests per second, and scale to support millions of users all around the world, others need to quickly understand and navigate billions of relationships between highly connected data.
Applications that try to navigate these relationships using SQL queries require join operations that can become complex, error prone, and slow to execute.
With Neptune, the company says, developers can query connected datasets with the speed and simplicity of a graph database, while benefiting from the scalability, security, durability, and availability of an AWS managed graph database service. The Amazon Neptune query processing engine is optimized for both of the leading graph models, Property Graph and W3C's RDF, and their associated query languages, Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and RDF/SPARQL, providing customers the flexibility to choose the approach based on their specific graph use case.
Amazon says Neptune is highly available and durable, automatically replicating six copies of data across three Availability Zones and continuously backing up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). It is designed to offer greater than 99.99% availability and automatically detects and recovers from most database failures in less than 30 seconds. Amazon Neptune also provides advanced security capabilities, including network security through Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and encryption at rest using AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
Amazon Neptune is available in the U.S. East (N. Virginia), U.S. East (Ohio), U.S. West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) regions, and will expand to additional regions in the coming year.
To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.