In the modern world, small and large companies need a way to understand their customers. They use different data input to make an analysis. The analysts are also identifying the customer needs’ trends to stay ahead of the competition.

The amount of data, which needs to be processed is huge. IT departments are faced with tons of information, which they need to work with on the tightest budget possible. The data seems to be growing while the resources aren’t getting much better. MapReduce is a powerful tool to help IT specialists deal with information. Even though it still involves time and expenses required to build an all-encompassing IT infrastructure, the results are achieved easier and faster than before.

Amazon presents EMR, an in-the-cloud MapReduce solution, which is located in Amazon’s data center. It allows the users to take advantage of space and power of the cloud while presenting an on-demand infrastructure to help work with big amounts of data and perform a proper analysis.

Surprising Flexibility

Amazon EMR allows you to handle a variety or resources. You can add and delete them manually or automatically. This option is highly demanded in cases when the data processing requirements are constantly changing or hard to forecast. For example, if the main volume of work is done during the night, the resource demand may be 5 times as bigger as during the day. In addition, the demand may grow for a short period.  In Amazon EMR, you can highlight hundreds or thousands of instances only when you need them in order not to pay for extra resources.

Low Cost

As with any cloud operation, Amazon EMR allows its users to lower the processing cost of the big data amounts. You can take advantage of low “per second” rates and an ability to use spot or reserved Amazon EC 2 instances. The lowest rate starts at $0.015 per hour for Small instance ($131.40 per year).

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

EMR heavily relies on Amazon Simple Storage Service. It gives the clients a web services interface, which they can use for storing and finding any amount of data. The data can be accessed at any time and from anywhere on the web.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon EC2 allows running instances of virtual machines in any of the AWS regions. You can start any number of instances you require without buying or renting hardware (for example, hosting services). EMR allows scaling the size of Hadoop cluster to any size you require without investing in new hardware and capacity planning.

Overall, Amazon EMR is a highly efficient cloud tool that allows analyzing huge amounts of data while using configurable and scalable computing power.