A social platform needs to store and traverse a network of users, follows, and shared interests, with hundreds of billions of edges that must be queried by multi-hop relationship patterns. Which managed service fits best?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: B
Amazon Neptune is a managed graph database built for highly connected data and multi-hop traversals. It supports property graph and RDF models with query languages such as Gremlin, openCypher, and SPARQL, and it is designed to scale to very large graphs. ElastiCache sorted sets handle ranked lookups in memory, not general graph traversal. DocumentDB stores nested documents and would need awkward joins for multi-hop queries. Redshift is an analytical warehouse, not a low-latency graph store.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. ElastiCache sorted sets are good for leaderboards and ranked lookups held in memory. Traversing many hops through a large network this way is not what the service is designed for.
- C. DocumentDB works well for JSON-style documents, but multi-hop traversal over arrays of follower IDs becomes costly and awkward. It is not a purpose-built graph engine.
- D. Redshift is an analytical columnar warehouse. Recursive CTEs can express some traversals, but it is not a low-latency operational graph store.