AWS EMR Tutorial – What Can Amazon EMR Perform?

Amazon Elastic MapReduce, or Amazon EMR, is a platform that is taking over the world. Companies around the world have realized how important gathering and using data can be for helping them grow. This data, when recognized and analyzed well, can tell businesses which products to release, how to target the right customer, how to beat the competition and more.

There are several different ways to get this done, but Amazon EMR is one of the best. It relies on some popular Amazon platforms to help gather, organize, and analyze the data in the way that makes the most sense for your company. Let’s take a look at how Amazon EMR works and how you can use it for your business and data needs.

What is AWS EMR?

Amazon EMR is a useful tool for many businesses to use. It provides these companies with a managed framework using Hadoop, along with the elastic infrastructure of Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.

One thing that works well in this framework, and makes it more efficient for getting work done, is that it is able to distribute computation of any data through many Amazon EC2 instances.

A new user simply needs to upload the data they want to use to their S3 bucket and then, just a few minutes later, they can upload the entire cluster. The output they need, after completing some easy analysis of the data, will come out of Amazon S3, making everything quick and efficient.

Being able to rely on many of the great services of Amazon to get your data analysis complete is one of the best parts of this whole process. Amazon also provides different pricing plans based on how much you plan to use the service, and your budget, so any company can see the benefits of using this framework.

The Benefits of Using Amazon EMR

Many companies have already chosen to work with Amazon EMR for their data analysis needs. There are a number of benefits that a company will enjoy when choosing Amazon EMR. These include:

1. Elastic: Thanks to the addition of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, any user has the ability to monitor all of the instances of data processing. You can even add in Amazon AutoScaling to modify how many instances happen automatically. You can do this manually too if you need to reduce costs.
2. Economical: Compared to most other options, Amazon EMR is economical. In fact, you can complete a Hadoop cluster of 10-nodes for $0.15 an hour. This can save you 50% or more on your costs.
3. Secure: All of Amazon’s sites and products have security in mind and Amazon EMR is no different. You can turn on the firewall to add more protection and control who has access to the cloud you use.
4. Flexible: One thing that many businesses love about Amazon EMR is how flexible it is. You can install more applications, customize the cluster and do so much more with this feature.

What Can I Do with AWS EMR?

Not only are there many benefits to working with AWS EMR, there are different activities that businesses can choose to use as well. Each business is different and while some big companies may use all or most of these features, smaller companies enjoy the flexibility of choosing the features they need the most.

Some of the different things that you can do with the help of Amazon EMR include:

1. Real-time analytics: When working with this feature, the user can use and process any of the data they have in real-time. This helps them to gather up the data and see the results as soon as possible, rather than waiting days or weeks. In a world where things change overnight, this can be a critical benefit.
2. Clickstream analysis: If you are interested in working with advertisements then this is a great feature found in Amazon EMR. For example, this product will use data from Clickstream before analyzing it to make useful and effective advertisements. This ensures your ads are more likely to reach the target audience and bring you sales than ever before.
3. Log Analysis: Depending on the type of cloud you choose to use, log processing may be a critical component of your business. Amazon EMR makes it easier to do, whether you want to track mobile or web use, or both. This data can then be converted over into useful insights that your business can look over.
4. Extract the Transform Load: This is a great tool to use if you need to quickly sort through and handle new data that is coming in. This is true even if the data set is very large.
5. Helps with predictive analytics: Part of using all this big data is for companies to learn what their customers like and want, and use that to make predictions about the future. Amazon EMR provides the tools to look through the data and form these predictions as accurately as possible. In fact, it includes MLlib to provide your business with machine learning algorithms, or you can use some of your own favorite libraries.
6. Genomics: Finally, Amazon EMR will often help with immense amounts of genomic data and can help with giant scientific information sets as quickly as possible. This is often a huge amount of data, more than most companies must face, and it's hard to find other platforms that can handle it. Amazon EMR will actually provide access to genomic data hosted for free when it is done through Amazon Web Services.

Amazon EMR can be beneficial to many companies who want to work on collecting and analyzing large sets of data. Data is king in much of the world around us today and knowing how to not only collect it, but sort through and understand it, is key.

Amazon EMR allows companies to do just that. Whether your company is big or small, or has a lot of data to get through, Amazon EMR can provide the right solutions, and the right price, to get things done.