Amazon adds data crunching to cloud compute services

Amazon.com started its cloud computing business with the basic storage (S3) and computing functions (EC2). But it's been slowly adding new products to the mix. The latest: Amazon Elastic MapReduce, which lets developers crunch "vast amounts of data" in the cloud. The service runs on Hadoop software on EC2.

Amazon says Elastic MapReduce can help with "data-intensive tasks for distributed applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research."

Here's more from the release:

“Some researchers and developers already run Hadoop on Amazon EC2, and many of them have asked for even simpler tools for large-scale data analysis,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services. “Amazon Elastic MapReduce makes crunching in the cloud much easier as it dramatically reduces the time, effort, complexity and cost of performing data-intensive tasks.”

Interestingly, Amazon's announcement of the new service contains a glowing reference from Netflix, one of Amazon's main competitors in the DVD and video-streaming business:

“Netflix is continually pursuing new technologies that extend our ability to deliver the best movie rental experience to our more than 10 million subscribers. Amazon Elastic MapReduce provides a powerful capability on top of the already robust Amazon Web Services technology platform. We’re enthused about the potential for this new technology to provide an even better experience to our members,” said Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt.

As TechCrunch notes, Amazon's Elastic MapReduce is an open-source version of MapReduce, a "data processing framework Google created to index and search the Web." Amazon's rollout of the service may complicate life for Cloudera, a startup that also offers Hadoop-based data processing on top of EC2.

Elastic MapReduce joins a growing suite of Amazon Web Services and products, including SimpleDB (database management), CloudFront (content delivery network), SQS (message storing), and the AWS management console.

About Eric Engleman

ERIC ENGLEMAN is senior technology staff writer for TechFlash and the Puget Sound Business Journal, covering online retail giant Amazon.com. Engleman tracks Amazon's increasingly complex business, spanning ecommerce, Kindle, cloud computing, and more. He's been covering technology and other industries for the Business Journal since 2003.

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