I think this slipped out a day early, but here is what came across in the DevPay documentation;

On April 2, 2009, AWS announced the release of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. For more information, go to http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce.


Here is the link to the official docs: http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, you can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as you like to perform data-intensive tasks for applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research. Amazon Elastic MapReduce lets you focus on crunching or analyzing your data without having to worry about time-consuming set-up, management or tuning of Hadoop clusters or the compute capacity upon which they sit.

I do wonder if they’re trying to move up the food chain a bit much. With this service, it is clear that they are walking over some people who have set up a business doing this for customers already. It feels l bit like what Microsoft used to do. They had special knowledge and APIs into the guts of the OS and could so things better than the competition once they decided to go there. Similar things could happen here. I feel better about Amazon in general, but it is a slippery slope!