Difference Between Amazon EMR and EC2

Every business, whether big or small, has an online presence now. Over time, they have collected insane amounts of data such as user data, usage data, and feedback data. Some of the leading businesses and organizations are generating even more of such data within seconds or minutes. This massive pool of data is what collectively goes by Big Data these days.  So, it is now becoming more and more important to process data in such proportions in order to get something meaningful and actionable out of it. Businesses have understood the potential of these huge data mines that they are sitting on.

Processing such proportions of data requires massive parallel processing in tens, hundreds or even thousands of clusters. This is where cloud computing comes to the picture. With cloud computing, processing Big Data has become easier and affordable even for small enterprises, or start-ups. One of the leading players in the cloud computing arena is Amazon Web Services (AWS) which offers an array of software and platforms available for use as a service. One of them is Amazon EMR and one of the services related to EMR is EC2.

What is Amazon EMR?

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) is one of the many cloud computing services provided by AWS for processing and analyzing big data quickly and efficiently. It is a managed service that simplifies managing big data analytics frameworks, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark on AWS. It makes deploying Hadoop and Spark easy and cost effective, and decouples computer and storage, allowing them to grow independently which helps in better utilization of resources. Amazon EMR enables you to completely remove the maintenance burden, providing both hardware and software maintenance as you need them. You can host big data services on AWS without having to do a lot of setup. It allows you to perform a plethora of use cases such as data analytics, data processing, data streaming, or even use EMR as a big data store itself.

What is Amazon EC2?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, is a web service that allows you to launch and manage server instances in Amazon’s data centers using APIs using SDK in your choice of language. It provides scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. It basically allows you to bring up your own servers, typically virtual machines running on physical servers. Each virtual server is completely isolated from all the other machines running on the same server. Using this service, you can provision instances of varied capacity on a cloud. It makes it easy for you to obtain virtual servers, also known as compute instances in the cloud, quickly and inexpensively. You simply choose the instance type of want, the template you like to use, and launch as much quantity as you need. Your instances will be up and running within minutes and you have full access with administrative control just like any other server.

Difference between Amazon EMR and EC2

Tool 

– Amazon EMR is one of the many cloud computing services provided by AWS for processing and analyzing big data quickly. It provides big data frameworks, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark right out of the box and ready for use utilizing EC2 and S3. Amazon EC2, short for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, is one of the oldest running services in AWS that provide scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. Amazon EC2 makes it easy for you to obtain virtual servers, also known as compute instances in the cloud, quickly and inexpensively.

Function

 – Amazon EMR enables you to completely remove the maintenance burden, providing both hardware and software maintenance as you need them. There is a very little underlying infrastructure to manage on your part. It allows you to host big data services on AWS without having to do a lot of setup. Amazon EC2, on the other hand, is the virtual equivalent of the computer that is currently sitting in front of you. It allows you to launch and manage server instances in Amazon’s data centers using APIs using SDK in your choice of language.

Pricing 

– The pricing structure of Amazon EMR depends on EC2 instances to spin up your Apache Spark or Apache Hadoop clusters. The cost varies depending on the instance type used and the hourly cost starts from $0.011 per hour and goes up to $0.27 per hour. You pay on a second basis for every second you use, with a minim of one minute. The best part is that you can choose from a combination of EC2 instances, spot and reserved instances. You can choose from four pricing models for Amazon EC2 instances – on-demand, reserved, spot, and dedicated hosts.

EMR vs. EC2: Comparison Chart

Summary

Amazon EMR provides a simple way of scaling running workloads, based on their processing requirements. It allows you to resize your cluster or its individual components as you see fit. It also integrates with other AWS services to provide additional storage, security and network requirements for your cluster. It completely removes the maintenance burden in terms of both hardware and software requirements. It makes it easy and cost-effective to process huge amounts of data across dynamically-scalable Amazon EC2 instances. An EC2 instance is a virtual machine hosted on the AWS cloud. Using EC2, you can provision instances of varied capacity on a cloud.

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