What is Amazon Neptune?
Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, fully managed graph database service for applications with highly connected datasets. At its core is a purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine optimized for storing billions of relationships and querying the graph with millisecond latency. Neptune supports the popular property-graph query languages Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and openCypher, as well as the W3C standard SPARQL query language for RDF graphs.
Neptune powers use cases such as recommendation engines, fraud detection, knowledge graphs, drug discovery, and network security. The database is highly available, with read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across Availability Zones.
Core Features
- Multi-Model Support: Property graphs (Gremlin, openCypher) and RDF (SPARQL) on one platform
- Neptune Serverless: Automatic capacity adjustment without manual capacity planning
- High Availability: Up to 15 read replicas across multiple Availability Zones, automatic failover
- Neptune Analytics: Separate analytics engine for fast in-memory analysis of large graph datasets
- Security: Network isolation via VPC and encryption at rest and in transit via AWS KMS
Typical Use Cases
Social Networks: Relationships between users are the central data structure; Neptune enables queries like “find friends of friends” with strong performance even for complex traversals.
Recommendation Systems: Graph traversals across product and user relationships enable collaborative filtering and content-based recommendations in real time.
Fraud Detection: Fraud networks show characteristic patterns in graphs, such as ring detection, identity fraud, or money laundering, which can be efficiently identified with graph queries.
Benefits
- Optimized for relationship queries with complex traversals
- Fully managed with automatic backup and patching
- Flexible scaling with Serverless, On-Demand, or committed pricing options
- Integration with AWS services like Lambda and SageMaker
Integration with innFactory
As an AWS Reseller, innFactory supports you with Amazon Neptune: We help with graph data modeling, query development with Gremlin, openCypher, or SPARQL, and migrating from relational databases to graph models.
Available Tiers & Options
On-Demand Instances
- Flexible scaling without upfront commitment
- Ideal for variable workloads
- No minimum contract term
- Higher costs for constant utilization
Reserved Instances / Database Savings Plans
- Cost savings vs. On-Demand with 1- or 3-year terms
- Predictable costs for stable workloads
- Upfront commitment required
Typical Use Cases
Technical Specifications
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Amazon Neptune?
Amazon Neptune is AWS's fully managed graph database, optimized for storing and querying highly connected data with millisecond-scale latency. It supports both property graphs (Gremlin, openCypher) and RDF graphs (SPARQL).
When should I use Neptune instead of a relational database?
Graph databases suit highly connected data such as social networks, recommendation systems, fraud detection, and knowledge graphs, where complex relationship queries would require many expensive JOINs in a relational database.
Which graph models and query languages are supported?
Neptune supports the property graph model with the query languages Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and openCypher, as well as the RDF model with the W3C standard SPARQL. Property graph data can be queried with either Gremlin or openCypher.
What is Neptune Serverless?
Neptune Serverless automatically adjusts capacity to the workload and is billed by Neptune Capacity Units consumed. It is well suited for unpredictable workloads and development environments.
How does Amazon Neptune scale?
Storage scales automatically up to 128 TiB. For read access, up to 15 Neptune replicas can be added to a cluster, which also provide high availability across multiple Availability Zones. Neptune Global Database additionally enables replication across AWS regions.
Note: All product information on this page has been compiled with care, but is provided without guarantee and may be outdated or incomplete. Cloud services evolve rapidly — features, pricing, SLAs, and availability change frequently. Authoritative and up-to-date information can only be found on the official product page of AWS (official documentation). This page does not represent an offer by AWS.