Difference Between Amazon EMR and EC2

Introduction

Every business, large or small, today has an internet presence. They have amassed massive amounts of data over time, including user, usage, and feedback. Some of the most successful companies and organizations are generating even more of this type of data in seconds or minutes.

Amazon EMR and Amazon EC2 are cloud-based services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that offer computing resources on demand. However, they differ in their specific use cases and the types of resources they offer. This article covers detailed knowledge of Amazon EMR and EC2 and their differences.

What is Amazon EMR?

Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) is a cloud-based big data platform that makes it easy to process vast amounts of data using popular open-source tools such as Apache Spark, Hadoop, and Presto. It provides a managed environment for processing large-scale data sets, making it simpler and more cost-effective for organizations to analyze and extract insights from their data.

Users can utilize Amazon EMR to deploy, configure, and manage Hadoop clusters in the cloud, making it simple to scale up or down based on workload demands.

Key Features

• Elastic – With Amazon EC2, you can change capacity quickly in minutes as opposed to hours or days. You can launch hundreds or even thousands of server instances at a time.

• Complete Control – You are in total command of your instances. You can interact with each one as you would any other machine because you have root access to them all.

• Flexible – You have a variety of instance types, operating systems, and software packages to choose from. You can choose a RAM, CPU, instance storage, and boot partition size on Amazon EC2 that is best for your chosen operating system and application.

What does Amazon EMR Provide?

Amazon EMR provides a managed environment for processing large-scale data sets using popular open-source tools such as Apache Spark, Hadoop, and Presto. EMR is designed to simplify the deployment, configuration, and management of big data processing frameworks, enabling users to get started quickly and easily without manually configuring their environment.

EMR provides a range of pre-configured and optimized machine images for various big data processing frameworks, such as Hadoop MapReduce, Hive, Pig, and Spark, as well as Presto for interactive SQL querying. These machine images come with pre-installed and pre-configured software components, libraries, and tools for running big data workloads.

EMR also provides automatic scaling features, allowing users to dynamically add or remove capacity as needed to handle changing workloads. EMR can automatically launch and terminate instances as necessary to optimize the use of computing resources and reduce costs.

EMR integrates with other AWS services like Amazon S3 for data storage, Amazon Redshift for data warehousing, and Amazon Kinesis for real-time data streaming, enabling users to easily ingest, process, and analyze data from various sources.

Overall, Amazon EMR provides a fully managed and scalable environment for processing big data workloads, with features designed to simplify deployment, reduce management overhead, and optimize performance and cost efficiency.

EMR also provides a range of pre-configured and optimized machine images for various big data processing frameworks, enabling users to get started quickly without manually configuring their environment.

What is Amazon EC2?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web-based cloud computing service that offers scalable processing power.

It allows users to quickly and easily provision virtual servers, known as instances, on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

With Amazon EC2, users can choose from various pre-configured instance types optimized for multiple use cases, including general-purpose computing, memory-intensive workloads, and high-performance computing. They can also customize instances with their operating system, application server, and other software components.

Amazon EC2 allows users to launch and terminate instances as needed, providing on-demand access to computing resources without upfront investments in hardware. It also provides features such as auto-scaling and load balancing, which enable users to adjust computing capacity based on workload demands automatically.

EC2 instances can be used for various computing tasks, including running web and mobile applications, batch processing, data analytics, machine learning, and scientific computing. They can also be used with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3 for data storage, Amazon RDS for database management, and Amazon CloudFront for content delivery.

Key Features

• Elastic – Amazon EMR gives you the flexibility to rapidly and simply provide as much capacity as you require and add or remove capacity whenever needed. Create additional clusters or resize an existing one.

• Affordable – Amazon EMR is made to make processing big amounts of data less expensive. Low hourly pricing, integration with Amazon EC2 Spot, Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance, flexibility, and Amazon S3 integration contribute to its low cost.

• Flexible Data Stores –Amazon EMR supports a number of data stores, including Amazon S3, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), and Amazon DynamoDB.

What Does EC2 Provide

Amazon EC2 is a service offered by Amazon that provides access to virtual machines running the operating systems and software of the cloud customer’s choice. These virtual computers may be running a Linux-based operating system, one of the many different flavors of Linux, or Microsoft Windows. The decision is entirely up to the cloud customer. However, compared to Amazon EMR, the software deployed on those computers is essential.

Difference between Amazon EMR and EC2

Amazon EMR is one of AWS’s numerous cloud computing services for swiftly processing and analyzing large amounts of data. It includes comprehensive data technologies like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark out of the box and is ready to use with EC2 and S3. Amazon EC2, or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, is one of the most established AWS services, providing scalable processing capability on the AWS cloud. Amazon EC2 makes accessing virtual servers, also known as cloud computing instances, fast and affordable.

Function

Amazon EMR allows you to eliminate the maintenance burden by offering hardware and software maintenance as needed. There needs to be more underlying infrastructure for you to manage. It enables you to host large data services on AWS without requiring extensive setup. Amazon EC2, on the other hand, is the virtual version of the computer you are presently using. It lets you launch and manage server instances in Amazon’s data centers via APIs and SDKs in your chosen language.

Pricing 

The Amazon EMR pricing structure is based on EC2 instances that spin up your Apache Spark or Apache Hadoop clusters. The cost varies depending on the instance type utilized, and the hourly cost ranges from $0.011 to $0.27 per hour. You pay per second for every second you use, with a minimum charge of one minute. The most excellent thing is that you can mix and match EC2 instances, spot instances, and reserved instances.

Overall, Amazon EC2 is a general-purpose computing platform that can be used for various tasks. At the same time, Amazon EMR is a specialized service for processing large-scale data sets using big data processing frameworks.

Conclusion

Amazon EMR makes it easy to scale running workloads based on their processing requirements. You can resize your cluster or its components as needed. It also interfaces with other AWS services to meet your cluster’s storage, security, and network needs.

It eliminates the need for maintenance in terms of hardware and software requirements. It makes processing massive volumes of data across dynamically expandable Amazon EC2 instances simple and cost-effective. A virtual machine housed in the AWS cloud is known as an EC2 instance. You can provide instances of varying capacity on a cloud using EC2.