Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) vs. Apache Flume vs. Apache Pig

We are running it to perform preparation which takes a few hours on EC2 to be running on a spark-based EMR cluster to total the preparation inside minutes rather than a few hours. Ease of utilization and capacity to select from either Hadoop or spark. Processing time diminishes from 5-8 hours to 25-30 minutes compared with the Ec2 occurrence and more in a few cases.

Incentivized

Apache Flume is well suited when the use case is log data ingestion and aggregate only, for example for compliance of configuration management. It is not well suited where you need a general-purpose real-time data ingestion pipeline that can receive log data and other forms of data streams (eg IoT, messages).

Incentivized

Apache Pig is best suited for ETL-based data processes. It is good in performance in handling and analyzing a large amount of data. it gives faster results than any other similar tool. It is easy to implement and any user with some initial training or some prior SQL knowledge can work on it. Apache Pig is proud to have a large community base globally.

Incentivized

• EMR does well in managing the cost as it uses the task node cores to process the data and these instances are cheaper when the data is stored on s3. It is really cost efficient. No need to maintain any libraries to connect to AWS resources.
• EMR is highly available, secure and easy to launch. No much hassle in launching the cluster (Simple and easy).
• EMR manages the big data frameworks which the developer need not worry (no need to maintain the memory and framework settings) about the framework settings. It's all setup on launch time. The bootstrapping feature is great.

Incentivized

• Multiple sources of data (sources) and destinations (sinks) that allows you to move data form and to any relevant data storage
• It is very easy to setup and run
• Very open to personalization, you can create filters, enrichment, new sources and destinations

Incentivized

• Its performance, ease of use, and simplicity in learning and deployment.
• Using this tool, we can quickly analyze large amounts of data.
• It's adequate for map-reducing large datasets and fully abstracted MapReduce.

Incentivized

• It would have been better if packages like HBase and Flume were available with Amazon EMR. This would make the product even more helpful in some cases.
• Products like Cloudera provide the options to move the whole deployment into a dedicated server and use it at our discretion. This would have been a good option if available with EMR.
• If EMR gave the option to be used with any choice of cloud provider, it would have helped instead of having to move the data from another cloud service to S3.

Incentivized

• It is very specific for log data ingestion so it is pretty hard to use for anything else besides log data
• Data replication is not built in and needs to be added on top of Apache Flume (not a hard job to do though)

Incentivized

• UDFS Python errors are not interpretable. Developer struggles for a very very long time if he/she gets these errors.
• Being in early stage, it still has a small community for help in related matters.
• It needs a lot of improvements yet. Only recently they added datetime module for time series, which is a very basic requirement.

Incentivized

Documentation is quite good and the product is regularly updated, so new features regularly come out. The setup is straightforward enough, especially once you have already established the overall platform infrastructure and the aws-cli APIs are easy enough to use. It would be nice to have some out-of-the-box integrations for checking logs and the Spark UI, rather than relying on know-how and digging through multiple levels to find the informations

Incentivized

It is quick, fast and easy to implement Apache Pig which makes is quite popular to be used.

Incentivized

I give the overall support for Amazon EMR this rating because while the support technicians are very knowledgeable and always able to help, it sometimes takes a very long time to get in contact with one of the support technicians. So overall the support is pretty good for Amazon EMR.

Incentivized

Apache Flume is open-source so support is limited. Never the less, it has great documentation and best practices documents from their end-users so it is not hard to use, setup and configure.

Incentivized

The documentation is adequate. I'm not sure how large of an external community there is for support.

Incentivized

Snowflake is a lot easier to get started with than the other options. Snowflake's data lake building capabilities are far more powerful. Although Amazon EMR isn't our first pick, we've had an excellent experience with EC2 and S3. Because of our current API interfaces, it made more sense for us to continue with Hadoop rather than explore other options.

Incentivized

Apache Flume is a very good solution when your project is not very complex at transformation and enrichment, and good if you have an external management suite like Cloudera, Hortonworks, etc. But it is not a real EAI or ETL like AB Initio or Attunity so
you need to know exactly what you want. On the other hand being an opensource project give Apache a lot of room to personalize thanks to its plug-able architecture and has a very nice performance having a very low CPU and Memory footprint, a single server can do the job on many occasions, as opposed to the multi-server architecture of paid products.

Incentivized

Apache Pig might help to start things faster at first and it was one of the best tool years back but it lacks important features that are needed in the data engineering world right now. Pig also has a steeper learning curve since it uses a proprietary language compared to Spark which can be coded with Python, Java.

Incentivized

• It was obviously cheaper and convenient to use as most of our data processing and pipelines are on AWS. It was fast and readily available with a click and that saved a ton of time rather than having to figure out the down time of the cluster if its on premises.
• It saved time on processing chunks of big data which had to be processed in short period with minimal costs. EMR solved this as the cluster setup time and processing was simple, easy, cheap and fast.
• It had a negative impact as it was very difficult in submitting the test jobs as it lags a UI to submit spark code snippets.

Incentivized

• Flume has simplified a lot many of our ingest procedures, easier to deploy and integrate than a classical EAI, reducing the time to market
• But opposed to EAIs if the project starts to grow in complexity Apache Flume project may not be as suitable

Incentivized

• Higher learning curve than other similar technologies so on-boarding new engineers or change ownership of Apache Pig code tends to be a bit of a headache
• Once the language is learned and understood it can be relatively straightforward to write simple Pig scripts so development can go relatively quickly with a skilled team
• As distributed technologies grow and improve, overall Apache Pig feels left in the dust and is more legacy code to support than something to actively develop with.

Incentivized