AWS Announces Amazon Neptune Serverless

October 26, 2022 at 18:03 PM EDT

New serverless option for Amazon Neptune automatically scales graph database workloads to hundreds of thousands of queries—saving up to 90% compared to the cost of provisioning for peak capacity

LexisNexis Legal & Professional, Snap, and Wiz among customers using Amazon Neptune Serverless

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced Amazon Neptune Serverless, a new serverless option for Amazon Neptune that automatically scales to support unpredictable and business-critical graph database workloads. Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, and fully managed service that makes it easy to build and run applications that need a graph database to efficiently store and query complex and highly connected datasets. Amazon Neptune Serverless includes Amazon Neptune’s advanced capabilities for high availability, performance, and resiliency. There are no upfront commitments or additional costs to use Amazon Neptune Serverless, and customers only pay for the database resources used. To get started with Amazon Neptune Serverless, visit aws.amazon.com/neptune/serverless.

Developers building applications that track relationships among many connected data points (e.g., contact tracing, fraud detection, drug discovery, and network security) use graph databases to understand and quickly connect relationships for a clearer understanding of the full dataset. Today, customers like Accenture, ADP, Cox Automotive, Merck, NBCUniversal, Siemens, Uber, and Zeta Global use Amazon Neptune to build and operate sophisticated and interactive graph-based applications that can query billions of relationships within data. Customers choose Amazon Neptune for its ease of use, durability, performance, and availability. Since many applications that rely on graph databases have variable or unpredictable workloads where the volume and complexity of database queries can be spiky or intermittent, capacity planning can be difficult. For example, a knowledge graph that models commercial airline flights in the United States might see a sudden spike during the holidays, or a knowledge graph that models traffic patterns of New York City taxis might see a sudden spike during rush hour. Traditionally, customers with variable or unpredictable workloads must constantly monitor and reconfigure capacity to maintain consistently fast performance, or over-provision for peak capacity, which results in unnecessary excess costs.

With Amazon Neptune Serverless, customers no longer need to provision, scale, and manage clusters of database instances. Amazon Neptune Serverless automatically provisions and scales graph database workloads to hundreds of thousands of queries to maintain consistently fast performance for applications with variable and unpredictable workloads. With Amazon Neptune Serverless, customers only pay for the database resources their applications use, saving customers up to 90% compared to provisioning for peak capacity. Amazon Neptune Serverless supports the same popular, easy-to-write graph query languages as Amazon Neptune. The new serverless offering provides the full breadth of Amazon Neptune capabilities, including supporting multiple AWS Availability Zones for high availability, read replicas for high performance, and fully managed software patching, updates, and backups for ease of use.

“Customers tell us that they appreciate the ability to use Amazon Neptune to understand complex relationships among highly connected data points. They have also asked us to take care of the heavy lifting associated with managing capacity and optimizing for cost and performance,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Databases, Analytics, and Machine Learning at AWS. “Now, with Amazon Neptune Serverless, customers have a graph database that automatically provisions and seamlessly scales clusters to provide just the right amount of capacity to meet demand, allowing them to build and run applications for even the most variable and unpredictable workloads without having to worry about provisioning capacity, scaling clusters, or incurring costs for unused resources.”

Amazon Neptune Serverless is generally available today to customers running Amazon Neptune in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Ireland), and Europe (London), with availability in additional AWS Regions coming soon.

LexisNexis Legal & Professional is a leading global provider of information and analytics. "Connecting networks of related data is a key source of innovation for our legal research platform, and graph databases enable us to continually expand the sets of legal data which can be linked and queried," said Kyle Patrick, senior architect at LexisNexis Legal & Professional. "With Amazon Neptune Serverless, our ability to scale from data science experiments to large-scale production systems can be far smoother and more cost effective. Since Amazon Neptune Serverless automatically scales capacity based on demand, we can build and share graph models with less concern around hitting capacity limitations or overprovisioning."

Snap Inc. is a camera company focused on empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together. “We use graphs to manage the relationships among 347 million people who use Snapchat every day to Snap with family and friends, watch Stories, and explore content from top publishers around the world,” said Martin Qian, senior manager of Software Engineering at Snap. “We are excited about Amazon Neptune Serverless, which will allow us to scale up our graph database workload performance only when we need it. With Amazon Neptune Serverless, our developers will be able to move faster and focus more on innovating on behalf of our customers rather than building and operating graph database infrastructure.”

Wiz is a cloud security platform that transforms how organizations secure their cloud using a graph-based approach. “At Wiz, we use Amazon Neptune to identify and map toxic combinations of cloud risks to reveal which of these pose the greatest threat. This allows our customers, including over 25% of the Fortune 100 and some of the largest cloud environments in the world, to fix what really matters," said Roy Reznik, co-founder and vice president of Research and Development at Wiz. “With Amazon Neptune Serverless, graph database workloads scale automatically to meet demand, so we never need to worry about managing database infrastructure and capacity and can instead focus on delivering more value for our customers.”

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