Amazon Neptune Construct Library

The APIs of higher level constructs in this module are experimental and under active development. They are subject to non-backward compatible changes or removal in any future version. These are not subject to the Semantic Versioning model and breaking changes will be announced in the release notes. This means that while you may use them, you may need to update your source code when upgrading to a newer version of this package.

Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, fully managed graph database service that makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets. The core of Neptune is a purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine. This engine is optimized for storing billions of relationships and querying the graph with milliseconds latency. Neptune supports the popular graph query languages Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and W3C’s SPARQL, enabling you to build queries that efficiently navigate highly connected datasets.

The @aws-cdk/aws-neptune-alpha package contains primitives for setting up Neptune database clusters and instances.

import * as neptune from '@aws-cdk/aws-neptune-alpha';

Starting a Neptune Database

To set up a Neptune database, define a DatabaseCluster. You must always launch a database in a VPC.

const cluster = new neptune.DatabaseCluster(this, 'Database', {
  vpc,
  instanceType: neptune.InstanceType.R5_LARGE,
});

By default only writer instance is provisioned with this construct.

Connecting

To control who can access the cluster, use the .connections attribute. Neptune databases have a default port, so you don't need to specify the port:

cluster.connections.allowDefaultPortFromAnyIpv4('Open to the world');

The endpoints to access your database cluster will be available as the .clusterEndpoint and .clusterReadEndpoint attributes:

const writeAddress = cluster.clusterEndpoint.socketAddress;   // "HOSTNAME:PORT"

IAM Authentication

You can also authenticate to a database cluster using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) database authentication; See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/neptune/latest/userguide/iam-auth.html for more information and a list of supported versions and limitations.

The following example shows enabling IAM authentication for a database cluster and granting connection access to an IAM role.

const cluster = new neptune.DatabaseCluster(this, 'Cluster', {
  vpc,
  instanceType: neptune.InstanceType.R5_LARGE,
  iamAuthentication: true, // Optional - will be automatically set if you call grantConnect() or grant().
});
const role = new iam.Role(this, 'DBRole', { assumedBy: new iam.AccountPrincipal(this.account) });
// Use one of the following statements to grant the role the necessary permissions
cluster.grantConnect(role); // Grant the role neptune-db:* access to the DB
cluster.grant(role, 'neptune-db:ReadDataViaQuery', 'neptune-db:WriteDataViaQuery'); // Grant the role the specified actions to the DB

Customizing parameters

Neptune allows configuring database behavior by supplying custom parameter groups. For more details, refer to the following link: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/neptune/latest/userguide/parameters.html

const clusterParams = new neptune.ClusterParameterGroup(this, 'ClusterParams', {
  description: 'Cluster parameter group',
  parameters: {
    neptune_enable_audit_log: '1'
  },
});

const dbParams = new neptune.ParameterGroup(this, 'DbParams', {
  description: 'Db parameter group',
  parameters: {
    neptune_query_timeout: '120000',
  },
});

const cluster = new neptune.DatabaseCluster(this, 'Database', {
  vpc,
  instanceType: neptune.InstanceType.R5_LARGE,
  clusterParameterGroup: clusterParams,
  parameterGroup: dbParams,
});

Note: To use the Neptune engine versions 1.2.0.0 or later, including the newly added 1.3 series, it's necessary to specify the appropriate engineVersion prop in neptune.DatabaseCluster. Additionally, for both 1.2 and 1.3 series, the corresponding family prop must be set to ParameterGroupFamily.NEPTUNE_1_2 or ParameterGroupFamily.NEPTUNE_1_3 respectively in neptune.ClusterParameterGroup and neptune.ParameterGroup.

Adding replicas

DatabaseCluster allows launching replicas along with the writer instance. This can be specified using the instanceCount attribute.

const cluster = new neptune.DatabaseCluster(this, 'Database', {
  vpc,
  instanceType: neptune.InstanceType.R5_LARGE,
  instances: 2,
});

Additionally, it is also possible to add replicas using DatabaseInstance for an existing cluster.

const replica1 = new neptune.DatabaseInstance(this, 'Instance', {
  cluster,
  instanceType: neptune.InstanceType.R5_LARGE,
});

Automatic minor version upgrades

By setting autoMinorVersionUpgrade to true, Neptune will automatically update the engine of the entire cluster to the latest minor version after a stabilization window of 2 to 3 weeks.

new neptune.DatabaseCluster(this, 'Cluster', {
  vpc,
  instanceType: neptune.InstanceType.R5_LARGE,
  autoMinorVersionUpgrade: true,
});

Logging

Neptune supports various methods for monitoring performance and usage. One of those methods is logging

1. Neptune provides logs e.g. audit logs which can be viewed or downloaded via the AWS Console. Audit logs can be enabled using the neptune_enable_audit_log parameter in ClusterParameterGroup or ParameterGroup
2. Neptune provides the ability to export those logs to CloudWatch Logs

// Cluster parameter group with the neptune_enable_audit_log param set to 1
const clusterParameterGroup = new neptune.ClusterParameterGroup(this, 'ClusterParams', {
  description: 'Cluster parameter group',
  parameters: {
    neptune_enable_audit_log: '1'
  },
});

const cluster = new neptune.DatabaseCluster(this, 'Database', {
  vpc,
  instanceType: neptune.InstanceType.R5_LARGE,
  // Audit logs are enabled via the clusterParameterGroup
  clusterParameterGroup,
  // Optionally configuring audit logs to be exported to CloudWatch Logs
  cloudwatchLogsExports: [neptune.LogType.AUDIT],
  // Optionally set a retention period on exported CloudWatch Logs
  cloudwatchLogsRetention: logs.RetentionDays.ONE_MONTH,
});

For more information on monitoring, refer to https://docs.aws.amazon.com/neptune/latest/userguide/monitoring.html. For more information on audit logs, refer to https://docs.aws.amazon.com/neptune/latest/userguide/auditing.html. For more information on exporting logs to CloudWatch Logs, refer to https://docs.aws.amazon.com/neptune/latest/userguide/cloudwatch-logs.html.

Metrics

Both DatabaseCluster and DatabaseInstance provide a metric() method to help with cluster-level and instance-level monitoring.

declare const cluster: neptune.DatabaseCluster;
declare const instance: neptune.DatabaseInstance;

cluster.metric('SparqlRequestsPerSec'); // cluster-level SparqlErrors metric
instance.metric('SparqlRequestsPerSec') // instance-level SparqlErrors metric

For more details on the available metrics, refer to https://docs.aws.amazon.com/neptune/latest/userguide/cw-metrics.html

Neptune Serverless

You can configure a Neptune Serverless cluster using the dedicated instance type along with the serverlessScalingConfiguration property.

Visit Using Amazon Neptune Serverless for more details.

const cluster = new neptune.DatabaseCluster(this, 'ServerlessDatabase', {
  vpc,
  instanceType: neptune.InstanceType.SERVERLESS,
  serverlessScalingConfiguration: {
    minCapacity: 1,
    maxCapacity: 5,
  },
});