MapR Technologies, Inc., the provider of the open, enterprise-grade distribution for Apache Hadoop, today announced the immediate availability of its MapR Distribution for Hadoop as an option within the Amazon Elastic MapReduce service. Customers can now provision dynamically scalable MapR clusters while taking advantage of the flexibility, agility and massive scalability of Amazon Web Services (AWS). In addition, AWS has made its own Hadoop enhancements available to MapR customers, allowing them to seamlessly use MapR with other AWS offerings such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon CloudWatch.

“We’re excited to welcome MapR’s feature-rich distribution as an option for customers running Hadoop in the cloud,” said Peter Sirota, general manager of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, AWS. “MapR’s innovative high availability data protection and performance features combined with Amazon EMR’s managed Hadoop environment and seamless integration with other AWS services provides customers a powerful tool for generating insights from their data.”

Customers can provision MapR clusters on-demand and automatically terminate them after finishing data processing, reducing costs as they only pay for the resources they consume. Customers can augment their existing on-premise deployments with AWS-based clusters to improve disaster recovery and access additional compute resources as required.

“For many customers there is no longer a compelling business case for deploying an on-premise Hadoop cluster given the secure, flexible and highly cost effective platform for running MapR that AWS provides,” said John Schroeder, CEO and co-founder, MapR Technologies. “The combination of AWS infrastructure and MapR’s technology, support and management tools enables organizations to potentially lower their costs while increasing the flexibility of their data intensive applications.”

When launching an Amazon EMR cluster via the AWS Management Console, EMR API, or command line client, customers simply choose MapR’s M3 or M5 edition as their Hadoop distribution. The M3 edition is available at no additional charge over standard Amazon EMR usage fees, while the M5 edition adds a nominal additional hourly cost.

MapR benefits to Hadoop users on AWS include:
• High availability – MapR provides a no-NameNode architecture with self-contained, self-healing HA so that customers do not experience downtime or data loss. In addition, MapR provides JobTracker HA and NFS HA so that the cluster is not impacted by any failure or maintenance in the underlying infrastructure.
• Data protection – MapR provides point-in-time recovery with snapshots, so that customers can recover from any user or application error. Snapshots are instantaneous and consistent, and can easily be persisted to Amazon S3.
• Inter-cluster mirroring – MapR’s advanced mirroring capability provides wide area replication from an on-premise MapR cluster to an AWS MapR cluster, and between AWS MapR clusters in different availability zones.
• Seamless scalability – Customers can easily expand, shrink, or shutdown an AWS MapR cluster using the AWS Management Console.
• Easy administration – AWS provides MapR as a managed service so customers do not need to worry about hardware provisioning, installation or configuration. The MapR Control System (MCS) and the AWS Management Console provide an integrated, in-depth view into cluster health and activities.
• High performance – MapR reduces the overall I/O throughput via automatic and transparent compression, differential snapshots and intelligent replica management.