Clone an Instance in Aura to Optimize Development Cycles

“Give me more manual toil and database management tasks in my daily development workflows,” said no developer ever.

One of the key goals of every developer is to optimize development cycles on a daily basis so you can spend more time coding and adding value for your users, and less time managing environments.

Team Aura has delivered a number of features to the platform that allows you to achieve that outcome. One of those is the ability to clone the data from your AuraDB instances to new and existing instances.

I’ll briefly outline how some of our existing users leverage this feature to reduce toil.

Dev-Test

Build out your initial development infrastructure by cloning your Development AuraDB instance into a new UAT, Staging, and then Production instances when the time is right.
Clone your Dev data into your existing UAT instance, and run tests to validate your recent changes. Keeping the same DBiD of the UAT environment minimizes the changes you need to make to any testing setup outside of Aura.

Isolate and Troubleshoot

Clone your production data to an existing or new instance to carry out troubleshooting if a change in the data or your application has unexpected consequences. There will be no downtime to your production environment while you clone the data.

Cross-product

Clone your data between products. Clone your AuraDB data into a new AuraDS instance so you can take advantage of the large range of data science algorithms optimized for Neo4j graph data in AuraDS.

Scaling for Production

Our largest users clone their production graph data to multiple instances, which allows them to scale up their production batch processing when required, completing tasks that previously took weeks in a matter of hours. When they are done, they just delete the cloned replicas.

With Neo4j Aura, you can clone into and out of any region, and while you clone, you can resize your database for greater flexibility.

We’ve got a great set of documentation around how to clone. Head over to check them out here.

Looking to the Future: Aura Team Prioritization

We in the Aura team rely on your feedback to help with our prioritization. If there is a feature or functionality you’re eager to get ahold of, please vote and walk through your needs with us. You can reach us here.

We’re working on making query logs available to aid your troubleshooting in all stages of your development cycle. Please upvote this feature in our feature request wall here.