AMI for aws ec2 A1 family (arm)

Neo4j Graph Platform Aura & Cloud
1

Hi all, We are a bootstrap startup company, just ramping up on the Neo4j and in the process of bringing up our AWS infrastructure.

As there's no 'Aura' for AWS, for step #1, running just a single instance rather that a more robust cluster is more than enough for us. First question would be of course which size of instance to choose, is T2.micro is good enough for example. But the main question is whether there's Neo4J AMI for the new arm instances. Performance wise they are at least as good as Intel instances and in multiple benchmarks the new A1 is even better. And they are also more budget friendly :slight_smile:

So I was wondering if anyone can tell me is there such an AMI, or alternatively is it possible/recommended to install manually the db on one of those A1 arm instances?
And then again, what is the recommended instance size considering light usage (at this stage we are only playing with it)?

Thank you in advance,
Vladimir

2

Hi @vladimir,

Yes, there are AMI Images for Neo4j both enterprise and community.

My recommendation, is start with T2.micro and benchmark your load, and my next instance type would be t2.medium (may be higher than that) for Dev.

For more production lifecycle - QA/ UAT / Prod, I would recommend Compute / Memory Optimized Instance types(but, again) based on your data workloads.

Towards production you should be looking towards Neo4j Clusters.

Hope this works.

Feel free to ask more questions to the community forums for suggestions.

3

Hi Dominic,

Thank you! I appreciate the response. I saw various Neo4J AMIs for x86 but I have not seen any AMI for the ARM instances (A1 family). Could u please point me to such an AMI?

4

Unfortunately, arm images are not there much in AWS Images. There are docker images, but they are experimental.

https://hub.docker.com/r/neo4j/neo4j-arm64-experimental

Any reasons for ARM ?

5

AWS ARM instances (which are developed internally by AWS) the A1 family, T4g, and c6gn (Graviton and Graviton 2 family) perform better in most of the benchmarks than x86 servers, and cost half of them... So same or better performance for half the money ... True I don't need a lot of them, but no reason not to do it :slight_smile:

6

Yes, A1 family have better CPU in terms of infrastructure.
Please read this thread, answered by Neo4j member

As of June 9th

  1. Neo4j is not supported on ARM64. Not just the docker image but the core product. Maybe we will add support in the future (it's being considered) but for now that's just how it is.

There is docker image but, its experimental and unsupported by Neo4j, and not production grade.
https://hub.docker.com/r/neo4j/neo4j-arm64-experimental

My 2 cents -> I would prefer to start to work on Stable and Supported releases, and test your application and database readiness, since you also unaware of the load and performance.

7

Completely agree! As a start-up I have enough unknowns without adding new untested platform.

Just was wondering perhaps I missed it and there's an ARM AMI to save me few $ along the way :slight_smile:

Thank you!