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Amazon EMR VS Databricks Unified Analytics Platform

Compare Amazon EMR VS Databricks Unified Analytics Platform 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.

Databricks Unified Analytics Platform logo Databricks Unified Analytics Platform

One platform for accelerating data-driven innovation across data engineering, data science & business analytics
  • Amazon EMR Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-02
  • Databricks Unified Analytics Platform Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-11

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.

Databricks Unified Analytics Platform features and specs

  • Scalability
    Databricks is built on Apache Spark, which allows for easy scaling of data processing and analytics operations across large datasets.
  • Integrated Environment
    Provides a unified analytics platform that combines data engineering, data science, and data warehouse capabilities, simplifying workflows.
  • Collaborative Workspace
    Enables collaboration between data engineers, data scientists, and analysts with its interactive notebooks and real-time collaboration features.
  • Lakehouse Architecture
    Combines the best features of data lakes and data warehouses, providing structured transactional data access over unstructured data.
  • Support for Multiple Languages
    Offers support for multiple programming languages such as Python, R, SQL, and Scala, making it versatile for different users.

Possible disadvantages of Databricks Unified Analytics Platform

  • Complexity
    Despite its powerful features, the platform can be complex to set up and manage, particularly for teams unfamiliar with similar environments.
  • Cost
    The platform can become expensive, especially when scaling operations and running large workloads continuously.
  • Learning Curve
    New users might face a steep learning curve, requiring training and practice to use the platform effectively.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Using proprietary tools and integrations could lead to dependency on Databricks, making it harder to switch to other solutions in the future.
  • Limited Offline Features
    As a cloud-native platform, Databricks relies heavily on internet connectivity, lacking robust offline features for some use cases.

Analysis of Amazon EMR

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Amazon EMR is generally considered a good option for organizations that need to handle large-scale data processing and analysis. Its integration with the AWS ecosystem, flexibility in resource management, and support for a wide array of big data frameworks make it a strong contender in the cloud-based big data processing market.

Why this product is good

  • Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) is a robust cloud service provided by AWS for processing and analyzing large datasets quickly and cost-effectively. It simplifies running big data frameworks like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark on AWS, offering scalability, flexibility, and integration with other AWS services. EMR is favored for its ability to dynamically allocate resources, thus optimizing both performance and cost for big data processing needs.

Recommended for

    Amazon EMR is recommended for data engineers, data scientists, and IT professionals who need to manage and process large datasets in a scalable, efficient, and cost-effective manner. It is especially suitable for businesses that are already using AWS services and want to leverage a tightly integrated ecosystem. Additionally, it is a good choice for organizations that require rapid and flexible data analysis capabilities provided by frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark, HBase, and Presto.

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

Databricks Unified Analytics Platform videos

No Databricks Unified Analytics Platform videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon EMR and Databricks Unified Analytics Platform)
Data Dashboard
83 83%
17% 17
Office & Productivity
0 0%
100% 100
Big Data
100 100%
0% 0
Development
35 35%
65% 65

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Amazon EMR should be more popular than Databricks Unified Analytics Platform. It has been mentiond 10 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: about 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

Databricks Unified Analytics Platform mentions (1)

  • Should I replicate all our transactional DB to Redshift?
    See more here: https://databricks.com/product/data-lakehouse. Source: about 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon EMR and Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, you can also consider the following products

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

Saturn Cloud - ML in the cloud. Loved by Data Scientists, Control for IT. Advance your business's ML capabilities through the entire experiment tracking lifecycle. Available on multiple clouds: AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI.

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

Amazon SageMaker - Amazon SageMaker provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly.

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

Azure Synapse Analytics - Get started with Azure SQL Data Warehouse for an enterprise-class SQL Server experience. Cloud data warehouses offer flexibility, scalability, and big data insights.