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Amazon EMR VS Google Cloud Dataproc

Compare Amazon EMR VS Google Cloud Dataproc 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.

Google Cloud Dataproc logo Google Cloud Dataproc

Managed Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop service which is fast, easy to use, and low cost
  • Amazon EMR Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-02
  • Google Cloud Dataproc Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-09

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.

Google Cloud Dataproc features and specs

  • Managed Service
    Google Cloud Dataproc is a fully managed service, which reduces the complexity of deploying, managing, and scaling big data clusters like Hadoop and Spark.
  • Integration with Google Cloud
    Seamlessly integrates with other Google Cloud services like Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Google Cloud Pub/Sub, allowing for easy data handling and processing.
  • Scalability
    Can quickly scale resources up or down to meet the computing demands, making it flexible for different workload sizes and types.
  • Cost Efficiency
    Offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, and can utilize preemptible VMs for reduced costs, making it a cost-effective option for running big data workloads.
  • Customizability
    Supports custom image management and initialization actions, allowing users to tailor clusters to meet specific needs.

Possible disadvantages of Google Cloud Dataproc

  • Complex Pricing
    Understanding and predicting costs can be challenging due to various pricing factors like cluster size, usage duration, and types of instances used.
  • Learning Curve
    Dataproc requires familiarity with Google Cloud and big data tools, which may present a steep learning curve for beginners.
  • Limited Customization Compared to Self-Managed
    While customizable, it may not offer as much flexibility and control as self-managed on-premises solutions, which can be limiting for highly specialized configurations.
  • Dependency on Google Cloud Ecosystem
    As a Google Cloud service, users are somewhat locked into the Google ecosystem, which may not be ideal for those using a multi-cloud strategy.
  • Potential Latency for Large Data Transfers
    Transferring large datasets between Dataproc and other services, especially across regions, might introduce latency issues.

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

Google Cloud Dataproc videos

Dataproc

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon EMR and Google Cloud Dataproc)
Data Dashboard
65 65%
35% 35
Big Data
74 74%
26% 26
Data Warehousing
73 73%
27% 27
Development
47 47%
53% 53

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Amazon EMR should be more popular than Google Cloud Dataproc. 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

Google Cloud Dataproc mentions (3)

  • Connecting IPython notebook to spark master running in different machines
    I have also a spark cluster created with google cloud dataproc. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Why we don’t use Spark
    Specifically, we heavily rely on managed services from our cloud provider, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), for hosting our data in managed databases like BigTable and Spanner. For data transformations, we initially heavily relied on DataProc - a managed service from Google to manage a Spark cluster. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
  • Data processing issue
    With that, the best way to maximize processing and minimize time is to use Dataflow or Dataproc depending on your needs. These systems are highly parallel and clustered, which allows for much larger processing pipelines that execute quickly. Source: over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon EMR and Google Cloud Dataproc, 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.

HortonWorks Data Platform - The Hortonworks Data Platform is a 100% open source distribution of Apache Hadoop that is truly...

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

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

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.