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Amazon EMR VS Apache Cassandra

Compare Amazon EMR VS Apache Cassandra 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 Cassandra logo Apache Cassandra

The Apache Cassandra database is the right choice when you need scalability and high availability without compromising performance.
  • Amazon EMR Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-02
  • Apache Cassandra Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-04-17

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 Cassandra features and specs

  • Scalability
    Apache Cassandra is designed for linear scalability and can handle large volumes of data across many commodity servers without a single point of failure.
  • High Availability
    Cassandra ensures high availability by replicating data across multiple nodes. Even if some nodes fail, the system remains operational.
  • Performance
    It provides fast writes and reads by using a peer-to-peer architecture, making it highly suitable for applications requiring quick data access.
  • Flexible Data Model
    Cassandra supports a flexible schema, allowing users to add new columns to a table at any time, making it adaptable for various use cases.
  • Geographical Distribution
    Data can be distributed across multiple data centers, ensuring low-latency access for geographically distributed users.
  • No Single Point of Failure
    Its decentralized nature ensures there is no single point of failure, which enhances resilience and fault-tolerance.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Cassandra

  • Complexity
    Managing and configuring Cassandra can be complex, requiring specialized knowledge and skills for optimal performance.
  • Eventual Consistency
    Cassandra follows an eventual consistency model, meaning that there might be a delay before all nodes have the latest data, which may not be suitable for all use cases.
  • Write-heavy Operations
    Although Cassandra handles writes efficiently, write-heavy workloads can lead to compaction issues and increased read latency.
  • Limited Query Capabilities
    Cassandra's query capabilities are relatively limited compared to traditional RDBMS, lacking support for complex joins and aggregations.
  • Maintenance Overhead
    Regular maintenance tasks such as node repair and compaction are necessary to ensure optimal performance, adding to the administrative overhead.
  • Tooling and Ecosystem
    While the ecosystem for Cassandra is growing, it is still not as extensive or mature as those for some other database technologies.

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 Cassandra videos

Course Intro | DS101: Introduction to Apache Cassandra™

More videos:

  • Review - Introduction to Apache Cassandra™

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon EMR and Apache Cassandra)
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Databases
0 0%
100% 100
Big Data
100 100%
0% 0
NoSQL Databases
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Amazon EMR and Apache Cassandra

Amazon EMR Reviews

We have no reviews of Amazon EMR yet.
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Apache Cassandra Reviews

16 Top Big Data Analytics Tools You Should Know About
Application Areas: If you want to work with SQL-like data types on a No-SQL database, Cassandra is a good choice. It is a popular pick in the IoT, fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product catalogs and playlists, and messaging applications, providing fast real-time insights.
9 Best MongoDB alternatives in 2019
The Apache Cassandra is an ideal choice for you if you want scalability and high availability without affecting its performance. This MongoDB alternative tool offers support for replicating across multiple datacenters.
Source: www.guru99.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Cassandra should be more popular than Amazon EMR. It has been mentiond 44 times since March 2021. 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
View more

Apache Cassandra mentions (44)

  • Why You Shouldn’t Invest In Vector Databases?
    In fact, even in the absence of these commercial databases, users can effortlessly install PostgreSQL and leverage its built-in pgvector functionality for vector search. PostgreSQL stands as the benchmark in the realm of open-source databases, offering comprehensive support across various domains of database management. It excels in transaction processing (e.g., CockroachDB), online analytics (e.g., DuckDB),... - Source: dev.to / 26 days ago
  • Data integrity in Ably Pub/Sub
    All messages are persisted durably for two minutes, but Pub/Sub channels can be configured to persist messages for longer periods of time using the persisted messages feature. Persisted messages are additionally written to Cassandra. Multiple copies of the message are stored in a quorum of globally-distributed Cassandra nodes. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Which Database is Perfect for You? A Comprehensive Guide to MySQL, PostgreSQL, NoSQL, and More
    Cassandra is a highly scalable, distributed NoSQL database designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers without a single point of failure. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Consistent Hashing: An Overview and Implementation in Golang
    Distributed storage Distributed storage systems like Cassandra, DynamoDB, and Voldemort also use consistent hashing. In these systems, data is partitioned across many servers. Consistent hashing is used to map data to the servers that store the data. When new servers are added or removed, consistent hashing minimizes the amount of data that needs to be remapped to different servers. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Understanding SQL vs. NoSQL Databases: A Beginner's Guide
    On the other hand, NoSQL databases are non-relational databases. They store data in flexible, JSON-like documents, key-value pairs, or wide-column stores. Examples include MongoDB, Couchbase, and Cassandra. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Redis - Redis is an open source in-memory data structure project implementing a distributed, in-memory key-value database with optional durability.

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

MongoDB - MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance NoSQL database.

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

ArangoDB - A distributed open-source database with a flexible data model for documents, graphs, and key-values.