Neo4j community edition on AWS additional storage options

Neo4j Graph Platform Aura & Cloud
1

Greetings!
I am quite new to Neo4j, especially, the cloud editions. I am planning to start with the community edition on AWS. I checked the neo4j AMIs and noticed that the actual database is stored on the root volume itself - which I would like to avoid.

What I would like is to store the actual data on a separate EBS volume attached to the instance. This way, (1) My data will be separate from the root volume, (2) I can pick/scale the storage size, (3) I can take/manage backups.

Is it possible to attach a separate EBS volume to the neo4j instance and store the data on it?

Thanks

2

Am I the only one who doesn't want to store the data on root disk? :thinking:

3

Generally just an AMI won't do this "out of the box" because it's just an AMI, but of course you can do it.

To do it, you would:

  • Provision an EBS volume for your data directory (/var/lib/neo4j/data)
  • Stop neo4j inside of the VM
  • Mount the EBS volume to the right spot
  • Restart Neo4j

Then you'd be good to go. For our enterprise offerings on AWS we do just this -- the data is on a separate EBS volume. But those are done with CloudFormation templates so we can automate a lot of this stuff like provisioning EBS and attaching it. When you launch an AMI you just get the operating system as it is.

4

I created an additional EBS volume to do just this. But when I mounted it to /var/lib/neo4j/data directory, it starts throwing errors with pam.

pam_unix(sudo:auth): auth could not identify password for

and the service doesn't come up. Any resolution on this?

5

We'd need more of an error to figure out what's going on there but my best guess is the file permissions may be off. The drive needs to be readable/writable by neo4j:neo4j (user & group in linux). If it's only root writable, neo4j would constantly fail to use it, since the service runs under that user.