Hadoop Elastic MapReduce by Amazon

I am about to start adding a new hadoop cluster for a particular task so I was pleasantly surprised when I found this email from Amazon AWS team sitting in my inbox regarding the announcement of Amazon Elastic MapReduce aka hosted Hadoop.

Dear AWS Customer,

We are excited today to introduce the public beta of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, you can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as you like to perform data-intensive tasks for applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research. Amazon Elastic MapReduce lets you focus on crunching or analyzing your data without having to worry about time-consuming set-up, management or tuning of Hadoop clusters or the compute capacity upon which they sit.

Working with the service is easy: Develop your processing application using our samples or by building your own, upload your data to Amazon S3, use the AWS Management Console or APIs to specify the number and type of instances you want, and click "Create Job Flow." We do the rest, running Hadoop over the number of specified instances, providing progress monitoring, and delivering the output to Amazon S3.

We hope this new service will prove a powerful tool for your data processing needs. You can sign up and start using the service today at aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce .

Sincerely,

The Amazon Web Services Team

Sure, the data is stored in S3 which would add an additional layer of latency but I see the benefits outweighing the cost.

This is a powerful addition to EC2 offerings. Kudos to AWS team and Dr. Werner Vogels for this forward thinking step. Among other things it can potentially increase Hadoop adoption significantly.