Amazon EMR is a cloud-native big data platform for processing vast amounts of data quickly, at scale. Using open source tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache HBase, Apache Flink, Apache Hudi (Incubating), and Presto, coupled with the scalability of Amazon EC2 and scalable storage of Amazon S3, EMR gives analytical teams the engines and elasticity to run Petabyte-scale analysis.
Director of Customer Operations & Account Management
Chose Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)
EMR is more suited for developers. Databricks feel more for data science-oriented with its notebooks and customs visualizations. With EMR you can more easily add additional capacity on-damnd on the instance. With others is a more cumbersome process. And then, you can also …
The alternatives to EMR are mainly hadoop distributions owned by the 3 companies above. I have not used the other distributions so it is difficult to comment, but the general tradeoff is, at the cost of a longer setup time and more infra management, you get more flexible …
1. Apache Spark is almost 100 % faster than Hadoop. 2. Apache Spark is more stable than Amazon EMR. 3. The end to end distributed machine library is more robust in Apache Spark.
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Apache Spark
Apache Spark has much more better performance and features if we compare with Hive or map/reduce kind of solutions. Spark has many other features for machine learning, streaming.
Even with Python, MapReduce is lengthy coding. Combination of Python with Apache Spark will not only shorten the code, but it will effectively increase the speed of algorithms. Occasionally, I use MapReduce, but Apache Spark will replace MapReduce very soon. It has many …
There are a few newer frameworks for general processing like Flink, Beam, frameworks for streaming like Samza and Storm, and traditional Map-Reduce. I think Spark is at a sweet spot where its clearly better than Map-Reduce for many workflows yet has gotten a good amount of …
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.
Well suited: To most of the local run of datasets and non-prod systems - scalability is not a problem at all. Including data from multiple types of data sources is an added advantage. MLlib is a decently nice built-in library that can be used for most of the ML tasks. Less appropriate: We had to work on a RecSys where the music dataset that we used was around 300+Gb in size. We faced memory-based issues. Few times we also got memory errors. Also the MLlib library does not have support for advanced analytics and deep-learning frameworks support. Understanding the internals of the working of Apache Spark for beginners is highly not possible.
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.
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.
I give Amazon EMR this rating because while it is great at simplifying running big data frameworks, providing the Amazon EMR highlights, product details, and pricing information, and analyzing vast amounts of data, it can be run slow, freeze and glitch sometimes. So overall Amazon EMR is pretty good to use other than some basic issues.
The only thing I dislike about spark's usability is the learning curve, there are many actions and transformations, however, its wide-range of uses for ETL processing, facility to integrate and it's multi-language support make this library a powerhouse for your data science solutions. It has especially aided us with its lightning-fast processing times.
There's a vast group of trained and certified (by AWS) professionals ready to work for anyone that needs to implement, configure or fix EMR. There's also a great amount of documentation that is accessible to anyone who's trying to learn this. And there's also always the help of AWS itself. They have people ready to help you analyze your needs and then make a recommendation.
1. It integrates very well with scala or python. 2. It's very easy to understand SQL interoperability. 3. Apache is way faster than the other competitive technologies. 4. The support from the Apache community is very huge for Spark. 5. Execution times are faster as compared to others. 6. There are a large number of forums available for Apache Spark. 7. The code availability for Apache Spark is simpler and easy to gain access to. 8. Many organizations use Apache Spark, so many solutions are available for existing applications.
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.
Spark in comparison to similar technologies ends up being a one stop shop. You can achieve so much with this one framework instead of having to stitch and weave multiple technologies from the Hadoop stack, all while getting incredibility performance, minimal boilerplate, and getting the ability to write your application in the language of your choosing.
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.
