Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Amazon EMR VS Apache Beam

Compare Amazon EMR VS Apache Beam and see what are their differences

Amazon EMR logo Amazon EMR

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that makes it easy to quickly process vast amounts of data.

Apache Beam logo Apache Beam

Apache Beam provides an advanced unified programming model to implement batch and streaming data processing jobs.
  • Amazon EMR Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-02
  • Apache Beam Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-31

Amazon EMR features and specs

  • Scalability
    Amazon EMR makes it easy to provision one, hundreds, or thousands of compute instances in minutes. You can easily scale your cluster up or down based on your needs.
  • Cost-effectiveness
    You only pay for what you use with EMR. There are no upfront fees. You can also leverage EC2 Spot Instances for a more cost-effective solution.
  • Ease of Use
    Amazon EMR has a user-friendly interface and integrates with a wide range of AWS services, making it easy to set up and manage big data frameworks like Apache Hadoop, Spark, etc.
  • Managed Service
    Amazon EMR takes care of the setup, configuration, and tuning of the big data environments, allowing you to focus on your data processing rather than managing infrastructure.
  • Security
    EMR integrates with AWS security features such as IAM for fine-grained access control, encryption options, and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for network security.
  • Flexibility
    Supports multiple big data frameworks including Hadoop, Spark, HBase, Presto, and more, facilitating a wide range of use cases.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon EMR

  • Complex Pricing Model
    EMR's pricing can be complex with costs varying based on instance types, storage, and data transfer. Predicting costs may be challenging.
  • Data Transfer Costs
    If your applications require transferring large amounts of data in and out of EMR, the associated costs can be significant.
  • Learning Curve
    Although EMR is easier to manage compared to on-premises solutions, there is still a learning curve associated with mastering the service and optimizing its various settings.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Since EMR is an AWS service, you may find it difficult to migrate to another service or cloud provider without significant re-engineering.
  • Dependency on AWS Ecosystem
    The full potential of EMR is best realized when integrated with other AWS services. This can be limiting if your architecture uses services from multiple cloud providers.

Apache Beam features and specs

  • Unified Model
    Apache Beam provides a unified programming model that simplifies the development of both batch and stream processing applications. This reduces the complexity in maintaining separate codebases for different types of data processing needs.
  • Portability
    The portability of Apache Beam allows developers to write their code once and run it on different execution engines like Apache Flink, Apache Spark, and Google Cloud Dataflow, offering flexibility in choosing the right runtime environment.
  • Rich SDKs
    Apache Beam offers rich SDKs for multiple languages including Java, Python, and Go, allowing a broader range of developers to leverage its capabilities without being restricted to a single programming language.
  • Windowing and Triggering
    It provides powerful abstractions for windowing and triggering, enabling developers to handle out-of-order data and late data arrivals efficiently, which is crucial for accurate stream processing.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Beam

  • Complexity
    Although Apache Beam simplifies certain aspects of data processing, its unified model and advanced features can introduce complexity, making it potentially challenging for developers unfamiliar with distributed data processing concepts.
  • Limited Language Support
    While Apache Beam supports Java, Python, and Go, the level of feature support and maturity can vary between these SDKs, which might limit adoption for developers using other programming languages.
  • Performance Overhead
    The abstraction layer provided by Beam to ensure portability might result in a performance overhead compared to using execution engines directly, potentially affecting performance-sensitive applications.
  • Evolving Ecosystem
    As an evolving framework, Apache Beam’s APIs and ecosystem components might change over time, requiring continuous learning and adaptation from developers to keep up with the latest updates and best practices.

Amazon EMR videos

Amazon EMR Masterclass

More videos:

  • Review - Deep Dive into What’s New in Amazon EMR - AWS Online Tech Talks
  • Tutorial - How to use Apache Hive and DynamoDB using Amazon EMR

Apache Beam videos

How to Write Batch or Streaming Data Pipelines with Apache Beam in 15 mins with James Malone

More videos:

  • Review - Best practices towards a production-ready pipeline with Apache Beam
  • Review - Streaming data into Apache Beam with Kafka

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon EMR and Apache Beam)
Data Dashboard
84 84%
16% 16
Big Data
78 78%
22% 22
Data Warehousing
78 78%
22% 22
Data Management
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Apache Beam might be a bit more popular than Amazon EMR. We know about 14 links to it since March 2021 and only 10 links to Amazon EMR. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Amazon EMR mentions (10)

  • 5 Best Practices For Data Integration To Boost ROI And Efficiency
    There are different ways to implement parallel dataflows, such as using parallel data processing frameworks like Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Apache Flink, or using cloud-based services like Amazon EMR and Google Cloud Dataflow. It is also possible to use parallel dataflow frameworks to handle big data and distributed computing, like Apache Nifi and Apache Kafka. Source: about 2 years ago
  • What compute service i should use? Advice for a duck-tape kind of guy
    I'm going to guess you want something like EMR. Which can take large data sets segment it across multiple executors and coalesce the data back into a final dataset. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Processing a large text file containing millions of records.
    This is exactly the kind of workload EMR was made for, you can even run it serverless nowadays. Athena might be a viable option as well. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • How to use Spark and Pandas to prepare big data
    Apache Spark is one of the most actively developed open-source projects in big data. The following code examples require that you have Spark set up and can execute Python code using the PySpark library. The examples also require that you have your data in Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). All this is set up on AWS EMR (Elastic MapReduce). - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • Beginner building a Hadoop cluster
    Check out https://aws.amazon.com/emr/. Source: about 3 years ago
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Apache Beam mentions (14)

  • Ask HN: Does (or why does) anyone use MapReduce anymore?
    The "streaming systems" book answers your question and more: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/streaming-systems/9781491983867/. It gives you a history of how batch processing started with MapReduce, and how attempts at scaling by moving towards streaming systems gave us all the subsequent frameworks (Spark, Beam, etc.). As for the framework called MapReduce, it isn't used much, but its descendant... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • How do Streaming Aggregation Pipelines work?
    Apache Beam is one of many tools that you can use. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Real Time Data Infra Stack
    Apache Beam: Streaming framework which can be run on several runner such as Apache Flink and GCP Dataflow. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Google Cloud Reference
    Apache Beam: Batch/streaming data processing 🔗Link. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Composer out of resources - "INFO Task exited with return code Negsignal.SIGKILL"
    What you are looking for is Dataflow. It can be a bit tricky to wrap your head around at first, but I highly suggest leaning into this technology for most of your data engineering needs. It's based on the open source Apache Beam framework that originated at Google. We use an internal version of this system at Google for virtually all of our pipeline tasks, from a few GB, to Exabyte scale systems -- it can do it all. Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon EMR and Apache Beam, you can also consider the following products

Google BigQuery - A fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

Google Cloud Dataflow - Google Cloud Dataflow is a fully-managed cloud service and programming model for batch and streaming big data processing.

Qubole - Qubole delivers a self-service platform for big aata analytics built on Amazon, Microsoft and Google Clouds.

Google Cloud Dataproc - Managed Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop service which is fast, easy to use, and low cost

Snowflake - Snowflake is the only data platform built for the cloud for all your data & all your users. Learn more about our purpose-built SQL cloud data warehouse.

Databricks - Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering and business.‎What is Apache Spark?