Amazon Neptune Cluster
Does ZopNight manage Amazon Neptune Cluster?
Amazon Neptune bills per instance-hour for every cluster member plus per GB-month of storage and per million I/O requests. ZopNight stops and starts non-production graph clusters on schedule through the Neptune management API and watches 90 days of Neptune namespace metrics for clusters serving no requests.
Rules that fire on Amazon Neptune Cluster
At a glance
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Scheduling notes | cluster stopped and started via the Neptune management API on schedule. |
Amazon Neptune is a managed graph database service billed per instance-hour plus storage and I/O. Development and analytics graph clusters frequently sit idle outside working hours while still billing full compute.
Graph queries stop; the meters do not
A Neptune cluster bills per instance-hour for every member instance, writer and replicas alike, at the rate of its instance class, plus per GB-month for cluster storage and per million I/O requests against it. The compute meters run whether the graph answers a million traversals an hour or none, which matters because graph workloads skew exploratory: proof-of-concept knowledge graphs, fraud-analysis experiments, and analytics clusters that work business hours at most.
Off-hours behavior
ZopNight stops and starts clusters on schedule through the Neptune management API. Stopping halts every member’s compute meter while storage keeps billing, and AWS imposes the same 7-day cap it applies to Aurora: a stopped Neptune cluster restarts itself after 7 days, so a recurring schedule is the only durable way to keep a dev graph parked.
The forgotten-experiment pattern
Neptune’s dominant waste shape is the experiment that outlived its question. A team loads a graph, runs its analysis, and moves on. The cluster keeps billing every instance-hour for months, because graph databases rarely sit in anyone’s operational review. Replicas provisioned for read scale that never came add multipliers to the same forgotten bill.
Watching for silence
Clusters are discovered on the 6-hour cycle. Hourly CloudWatch metrics from the Neptune namespace run with a 90-day lookback, per-cluster cost comes from Cost Explorer or CUR 2.0, and idle recommendations key on sustained request silence rather than a single quiet day.
Cluster and instance rows in the console
Neptune console, then Databases (shared with the RDS-style layout): the cluster row expands into member instances, each an instance-hour meter. The Monitoring tab’s request charts are where an abandoned graph shows its flat line.