Amazon Cloud Directory enables you to build flexible cloud-native directories for organizing hierarchies of data along multiple dimensions. With Cloud Directory, you can create directories for a variety of use cases, such as organizational charts, course catalogs, and device registries. While traditional directory solutions, such as Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) and other LDAP-based directories, limit you to a single hierarchy, Cloud Directory offers you the flexibility to create directories with hierarchies that span multiple dimensions. For example, you can create an organizational chart that can be navigated through separate hierarchies for reporting structure, location, and cost center.
Amazon Cloud Directory automatically scales to hundreds of millions of objects and provides an extensible schema that can be shared with multiple applications. As a fully-managed service, Cloud Directory eliminates time-consuming and expensive administrative tasks, such as scaling infrastructure and managing servers. You simply define the schema, create a directory, and then populate your directory by making calls to the Cloud Directory API.
Efficiently organize hierarchies of data across multiple dimensions
Many applications require building directories to store hierarchies of data with multiple dimensions. For example, an organizational chart could have one hierarchy based on reporting structure, a second based on location, and a third based on cost center. Amazon Cloud Directory enables you to combine different schemas within a single directory to create multiple hierarchies without having to duplicate data.
Scale automatically on managed infrastructure
Amazon Cloud Directory is designed to automatically scale to hundreds of millions of objects. Amazon built Cloud Directory on highly scalable, managed infrastructure that provides high availability and built-in server management. Unlike traditional databases and directories, Cloud Directory does not require upfront capacity planning or continuous, manual optimization.
Search your directory for objects and relationships
Searching large sets of highly connected data has traditionally required complex and computationally expensive queries. With Amazon Cloud Directory’s built-in search capabilities, you can search for all the parent objects along a dimension without creating multiple, nested queries. For example, looking up a management chain for an employee can be performed with a single query in Cloud Directory where traditional solutions would require multiple queries.
Easily adapt to changing data requirements
Application data requirements evolve over time. Amazon Cloud Directory is built around a model that explicitly makes room for change. Cloud Directory has a flexible schema so you can extend your schema with new attributes at any time. Multiple applications can independently extend the schema. This enables applications to share a single directory and avoid duplication of data.
Simplify policy management
With Amazon Cloud Directory, you can attach application-specific policies to objects and define policy inheritance rules along different hierarchies. For example, you can create a custom policy for an organizational chart to allocate budget limits through your cost center hierarchy, and enforce naming conventions for your device hierarchy. Cloud Directory enables your application to evaluate and enforce these policies on demand to meet the unique requirements of your application. You are not limited by the native policies of a directory.
Integrate with AWS CloudTrail and tagging
Amazon Cloud Directory is integrated with AWS CloudTrail and resource tagging. Using AWS CloudTrail you can log the date, time, and identity of users who accesses your directory data. With resource tagging, you can tag your directories and schemas to better track and manage resources.
You can use Amazon Cloud Directory to create organizational charts for use in human resources applications. Human capital management (HCM) systems, finance tools, and employee directories need to be aware of multiple types of relationships within an organization. Cloud Directory makes it easy to track multiple dimensions within a single organization, such as reporting structure, office location, and cost center.
Amazon Cloud Directory provides the foundational piece you need to create an application directory for large fleet management systems. For example, a fleet management system for a logistics company needs to track the number and type of vehicles assigned to a location, the customer or employee assigned that vehicle on a specific date, and the status of that vehicle to determine if it is available for use. Cloud Directory enables you to create hierarchies along multiple dimensions to store all this data within a single directory.
Amazon Cloud Directory helps you build course catalogs that are optimized to track courses across multiple, overlapping categories. Courses often do not fit under a single category, forcing developers to duplicate data. With Cloud Directory, you can organize an introductory biology class under science courses, learning paths, and requirements for a specific degree or program.
It’s easy to get started with Amazon Cloud Directory. Follow our console walkthrough to set up Cloud Directory in just a few clicks.
