Neptune is a fully managed service that automates many of the normal operational tasks you would have to do when using on-premise or self-managed databases such as Neo4j Enterprise or Community Edition:
Automated backups – Neptune backs up your cluster volume automatically and retains the backup for a retention period that you specify (from 1 to 35 days). These backups are continuous and incremental, so you can quickly restore to any point within the retention period. No performance impact or interruption of database service occurs as backup data is being written.
Manual Snapshots – Neptune lets you make a storage-volume snapshot of your DB cluster to back up the entire DB cluster. This kind of snapshot can then be used to restore the database, make a copy of it, and share it across accounts.
Cloning – Neptune supports a cloning feature that lets you create cost-effective clones of a database quickly. The clones use a copy-on-write protocol to require only minimal additional space after they are created. Database cloning is an effective way to try out new Neptune features or upgrades with no disruption to the originating cluster.
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Monitoring – Neptune provides various methods to monitor the performance and usage of your cluster, including:
Instance status
Integration with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail
Audit log capabilities
Event notifications
Tagging
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Security – Neptune provides a secure environment by default. A cluster resides within a private VPC that provides network isolation from other resources. All traffic is encrypted via SSL, and all data is encrypted at rest using AWS KMS.
In addition, Neptune integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to provide authentication. By specifying IAM condition keys, you can use IAM policies to provide fine-grained access control over data actions.
Tooling and integration differences between Neptune and Neo4j
Neptune has a different architecture for integrations and tools than Neo4j, which may impact the architecture of your application. Neptune uses the compute resources of the cluster to process queries, but leverages other best-in-class AWS services for functionality like full-text search (using OpenSearch), ETL ( using Glue), and so forth. For a full listing of these integrations, see Neptune integrations.
