After showing it off last year at AWS re:Invent 2017, Amazon Web Services announced Wednesday that its new cloud graph database, Amazon Neptune, is ready for the general public to take it for a spin.
Amazon Neptune fills a gap across the array of databases AWS customers can choose to run on its cloud, giving the company its own graph database product to offer next to open-source graph databases like JanusGraph and commercial products like Neo4j. AWS now offers six managed and generally available databases on its cloud service as well as a database migration service for moving hosted databases into the cloud.
Graph databases are designed for applications that need to quickly make sense of the associations between different groups of data. They allow users to store related bits of data as a graph that can be accessed in a single operation, rather than a bunch of individual queries for all that data.
Companies building social networks, fraud-detection apps or personalization features for existing apps, for example, can take advantage of graph databases to deliver more flexibility and speed. AWS rival Microsoft’s Azure Cosmos DB also offers graph database capabilities.
Amazon Neptune will replicate six copies of your data across three availability zones within AWS computing regions, and AWS said it was designed for 99.99 percent uptime. It is available in the US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) regions, with more expected to arrive later this year.