Is AWS Elastic MapReduce A Game Changer?
April 6th, 2009 : Rich Miller Last week Amazon Web Services introduced the latest addition to its growing suite of cloud computing services: Elastic MapReduce, a hosted Hadoop framework that offers AWS users the ability to process huge amounts of data. This strikes me as an important offering for Amazon. Here’s what other cloud watchers are saying: • VentureBeat says that Elastic MapReduce “marks Amazon’s movement away from just providing the bare-bones infrastructure and towards offering services on-top of the infrastructure.” • Dana Gardner at ZDNet believes this could be a game-changer for Amazon. “Think of it as having your own tuned supercomputer that you can plug gigantic data sets into and ask questions that will determine the course of your businesses for the next decade,” he writes. “And you can pay for the pleasure on a credit card.” • ReadWriteWeb says that “MapReduce is the new, big hammer, and as developers start looking around, every dataset starts looking like a nail.” •
