Hosting Neo4j in the Cloud

Do you want to deploy Neo4j to the cloud? This section features guides and tutorials to help you understand the available options.

Topics include:

Deploying with Neo4j AuraDB
Deploying on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Deploying on Amazon EC2
Deploying on Microsoft Azure
Deploying with Docker, Kubernetes, and more (any cloud platform)
Deploying on other PaaS offerings

Neo4j AuraDB

Neo4j AuraDB is a database-as-a-service hosted by Neo4j that is designed to be flexible and highly reliable in providing graphs for any project.

Whether dealing with critical business applications or 24/7 access needs, Neo4j AuraDB ensures it is always available. This means developers can build applications and solutions with Neo4j anytime, anywhere without the maintenance concerns of other databases or implementations.

For more information, check out the AuraDB product page or get help on an existing instance with our AuraDB guides. Helpful guides and support are available on the AuraDB support pages.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Google Cloud Platform, offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube. Alongside a set of management tools, it provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics, and machine learning.

Running on Google Cloud provides a few options, depending on what you want to do.

Neo4j AuraDB is available via the official GCP Marketplace that allows you to subscribe, provision and bill the instances to your GCP account
Single instance - our Google cloud image documentation gives you the steps to launch a single instance from an image with a few commands and interact with the Neo4j instance.
Causal Cluster - the Enterprise edition of Neo4j is also available on GCP Marketplace, and users can launch a causal cluster from there. The launch and interaction steps to deploy Neo4j causal clusters on GCP are shown in the Neo4j documentation. We also have a step-by-step tutorial for deploying a Neo4j cluster with GCP.
Google Kubernetes Marketplace (Docker container-based) - Neo4j Enterprise is also available on Kubernetes Marketplace, so users can launch Neo4j clusters into Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters. For a walkthrough, please consult the blog post showing how to launch Neo4j on Google Kubernetes Marketplace. Technical artifacts and templates that support GKE can be found on the GitHub repository.

The Neo4j documentation also contains a section on automating your deployment using Google Cloud Deployment Manager.

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

There are three options for running on EC2 detailed below, with each option depending on the needs of the user and environment.

Single instance (VM-based) - instructions for launching VMs with Amazon’s command line tool are provided in the developer guide to deploy Neo4j on EC2 with a custom Amazon Machine Image (AMI)^. Using this method, both Community and Enterprise options are available.
Neo4j Community edition - available from the AWS marketplace.

For this installation, we recommend you select the option in security group settings to "Create new security group based on seller settings". This will ensure that when the instance is launched, the default ports that are needed will be open.

Causal Cluster - launch directly from the AWS Marketplace, as well. This option creates a multi-VM clustered configuration with the choice to configure a number of aspects of the cluster, including number of core nodes, read replicas, hardware sizing, encrypted EBS volumes, and other options.

The Neo4j documentation also contains a section on automating your deployment using CloudFormation.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.

Neo4j can be deployed directly from Azure Marketplace.

Single Instance - for a walkthrough of how to create single instances, please consult the documentation to deploy Neo4j on Azure.
Causal Cluster - a walkthrough for creating clusters is in the documentation to deploy a Neo4j causal cluster on Azure.

The Neo4j documentation also contains a section on automating your deployment using Azure Resource Manager.

Kubernetes, Mesosphere, & Docker (on any cloud)

For Docker users, Neo4j provides complete instructions on using provided Docker containers.

For users who wish to run Neo4j in kubernetes clusters, Neo4j provides a helm chart, which permits installation using standard kubectl and helm tools. These kubernetes tools and approaches all take advantage of the standard Neo4j docker container mentioned above, but add clustering and coordination capabilities. Additional information is provided in the orchestration developer guide, and a walkthrough of how to use the helm chart to get started is available on Neo4j blog.

For those interested in running Neo4j with Mesosphere DC/OS, the orchestration developer guide provides more details and resources.

Other PaaS Offerings

There are other hosting providers that can run Neo4j, as well.

Questions?

You can ask questions and connect with other people launching Neo4j in the cloud through the cloud topic on the Community Site. Official documentation for launching Neo4j on each of the cloud provider platforms is in the Neo4j Operations Manual.

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