Amazon Cloud Directory Features

Amazon Cloud Directory will no longer be open to new customers starting on November 7, 2025. As a customer with data stored on Cloud Directory, you are able to continue using Cloud Directory normally, including creating new directories, adding and updating data and using all existing Cloud Directory functionality. For alternatives to Cloud Directory, explore Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Neptune. If you need help choosing the right alternative for your use case, or for any other questions, contact AWS Support.

Amazon Cloud Directory makes it easy to create highly flexible, scalable, and cost effective directories. 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 offers an extensible schema, designed to be shared across applications. You can define application-specific collections of attributes, so applications can extend schemas safely without risk of impacting other applications.

Amazon Cloud Directory automatically scales to hundreds of millions of objects. As a fully-managed service, Cloud Directory eliminates time-consuming and expensive administrative tasks, such 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.

Amazon Cloud Directory is designed to manage multiple hierarchies of directory data. You can define attributes for objects and relationships, create multiple schemas, and set custom inheritance rules for your directory.

Amazon Cloud Directory’s flexible schema management enables you to extend your directory schema as needed. You can add attributes to directory objects and relationships. Multiple applications can independently extend the schema. This enables applications to share a single directory and avoid duplication of data.

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.

Amazon Cloud Directory offers built-in search capabilities for directory objects and relationships. Searching large sets of highly connected data has traditionally required complex and computationally expensive queries. With Cloud Directory’s built-in search capabilities, you can search for all the parent objects along a dimension without creating multiple, nested queries.

Amazon Cloud Directory automatically encrypts data at rest and in transit by using 256-bit encryption keys that are managed by the AWS Key Management Service (KMS).

Amazon Cloud Directory enables you to define and attach application-specific policies to objects 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. You can also define inheritance rules for your policies without granting Cloud Directory visibility into your security or permissions model. Cloud Directory does not interpret policies; it provides a framework for your application to evaluate policy assignments.