Amazon Elastic MapReduce Now Supports Spot Instances

Posted on: Aug 18, 2011
Starting today, customers have the ability to run their Amazon Elastic MapReduce applications on Spot Instances, significantly reducing the cost of processing vast amounts of data on managed Apache Hadoop clusters. Customers can run their Elastic MapReduce applications entirely on Spot Instances to enjoy the largest potential cost savings or they can easily mix Spot Instances with On-Demand and/or Reserved Instances to protect against cluster failure due to Spot Instances being outbid.

To see how customers have reduced their data analytics costs by over 50% through the use of Spot Instances, please view the foursquare®, Fliptop and So-net case studies. Other use cases for Spot Instances with Amazon Elastic MapReduce include scaling out to increase the speed of application execution, trading flexibility in the time of completion for cost savings, and reducing the cost of application testing.

To learn how to use the AWS Management Console to launch Amazon Elastic MapReduce clusters on Spot Instances, please view this Getting Started Video. For additional information on using the feature, including how to use it with the Java SDK and Ruby CLI, please visit the Spot Instances section of the Amazon Elastic MapReduce Developer Guide. For additional information on Spot Instances please visit the Amazon EC2 Spot Instances page.