Amazon Web Services Inc. finally made its cloud-based graph database Amazon Neptune generally available today, almost six months to the day after it was first unveiled at its AWS re:Invent conference.

Amazon Neptune becomes the sixth database offering available on Amazon’s public cloud platform, giving it a rival to existing open-source graph databases such as Neo4J and JanusGraph. It also gives Amazon a more complete competitor to Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Cosmos DB, which comes with its own graph database capabilities.

Graph databases such as Neptune are designed to power software applications that need to make sense of the associations among different sets of data. With Neptune, users can store related data types in a graph format that allows them to be accessed in a single operation, instead of by individual queries.

Graph databases are increasingly popular with developers because they provide unique capabilities for building services such as social networks. For example, they can be used to map relationships among different entities within a network, Amazon said when it unveiled Neptune last year.

Amazon noted at the time that graph databases are notoriously difficult to set up, and said that was one of the things it was hoping to change with Neptune. The company’s technical evangelist, Randall Hunt, described Neptune as a “purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine optimized for storing billions of relationships and querying the graph with milliseconds of latency.”

AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy provided more details of Neptune’s graph technology during his keynote at re:Invent:

During the preview phase, customers have used Amazon Neptune to build social networks, recommendation engines, fraud detection services, knowledge graphs, drug discovery applications and more, the company said.

“The ability of graph databases to model social and other relationships makes them very attractive to company executives who are looking for a platform to build next-generation applications,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc. “Amazon Web Services is no exception in realizing the need for these database services, and with the general availability of Neptune has taken a major step toward becoming an attractive partner and player in the graph database business.”

James Kobelius, an analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, said last month that Amazon Neptune might just have what it takes to finally fulfill the hype surrounding graph databases, which have been around for several years already without going mainstream.

“[Amazon Neptune] is able to store billions of graph relationships with continuous backups to S3, execute low-latency graph traversal queries, integrate transactional and analytic processing, replicate data across availability zones, provide data encryption at rest and in transit, and support full backup and restore,” Kobelius said. “And it is a native graph database rather than, as with Microsoft Corp.’s offerings, simply a graph abstraction layer over a relational or multimodel database.”

Amazon said Neptune can replicate six copies of data across three of its availability zones within AWS computing regions, and is designed for 99.99 percent uptime. Amazon Neptune is available now in the U.S. East (Northern Virginia), U.S. East (Ohio), U.S. West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) regions, with more regions to follow later this year.

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