Amazon launches data processing service

Amazon Web Services LLC announced the launch of beta of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a web service aimed at making it easier and cheaper for businesses, researchers, data analysts and developers to process large amounts of data. 

The web service utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework that runs on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). 

Amazon Elastic MapReduce allows provision of the capacity that the user sets as the data-intensive tasks are performed. The cost effective side of the service is that, as customers of all other AWS services, Amazon Elastic MapReduce users will also only pay for the capacity that they use. Moreover, AWS is providing a number of sample applications and tutorials to get started using Amazon Elastic MapReduce. 

The job flows created by Amazon Elastic MapReduce are executed by Hadoop software on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon EC2. The number and type of Amazon EC2 instances specified by customers are automatically launched and configured by the service. The following stage is Hadoop implementation of the MapReduce programming model that involves large amounts of user input data from Amazon S3 and subdivides it for parallel processing through Amazon EC2 instances. The completed process outputs re-combined data that is reduced to the final solution and deposited back into Amazon S3. Moreover, users are able to configure, manipulate, and monitor job flows using APIs of the web service or the AWS Management Console.