Amazon on Thursday announced a new cloud computing service that uses Hadoop, a free software framework, to crunch tons of data.
The service, called Amazon Elastic MapReduce, is designed for businesses, researchers and analysts trying to conduct data intensive number crunching. Hadoop, which is used by companies like Yahoo, is being pushed into the enterprise data center by startups like Cloudera.
Amazon’s Hadoop framework runs on the company’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). The general idea is that customers can use MapReduce to pay by the sip as they do things like index the Web, data mine, conduct financial analysis, simulation and bioinformatics research. In a must read analysis, Dana Gardner reckons that Amazon’s move could be a game changer for business intelligence.
In a statement, Amazon said:
Amazon Elastic MapReduce creates data processing job flows that are executed by Hadoop software on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon EC2. The service automatically launches and configures the number and type of Amazon EC2 instances specified by customers. It then kicks off a Hadoop implementation of the MapReduce programming model, which loads large amounts of user input data from Amazon S3 and then subdivides it for parallel processing using Amazon EC2 instances. As processing completes, data is re-combined and reduced into a final solution, and the results deposited back into Amazon S3. Users can configure, manipulate, and monitor job flows through web service APIs or via the AWS Management Console.
That roughly translates to: Bring your data mining to us.
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