Amazon Neptune | Hardware and Scaling

Question 1

What are IOs in Amazon Neptune and how are they calculated?

Hardware and Scaling

Amazon Neptune | Database

Answer 1

IOs are input/output operations performed by Amazon Neptune against an SSD-based virtualized storage layer. Every database page read operation counts as one IO. Amazon Neptune issues reads against the storage layer in order to fetch pages not present in the buffer cache. Each page is 16KB in Amazon Neptune.

Amazon Neptune was designed to eliminate unnecessary IO operations in order to reduce costs and to ensure resources are available for serving read/write traffic. Write IOs are only consumed when pushing transaction log records to the storage layer for the purpose of making writes durable. Write IOs are counted in 4KB units. For example, a transaction log record that is 1024 bytes will count as one IO operation. However, concurrent write operations whose transaction log is less than 4KB can be batched together by the Amazon Neptune database engine in order to optimize I/O consumption. Unlike traditional database engines Amazon Neptune never pushes modified database pages to the storage layer, resulting in further IO consumption savings.

Question 2

What are the minimum and maximum storage limits of an Amazon Neptune database?

Hardware and Scaling

Amazon Neptune | Database

Answer 2

The minimum storage is 10GB. Based on your database usage, your Amazon Neptune storage will automatically grow, up to 64 TB, in 10GB increments with no impact to database performance. There is no need to provision storage in advance.