You can launch an EMR cluster in minutes. You don’t need to worry about node provisioning, cluster setup, Hadoop configuration, or cluster tuning. EMR takes care of these tasks so you can focus on analysis. Data scientists, developers and analysts can also use EMR Notebooks, a managed environment based on Jupyter Notebook, to build applications and collaborate with peers.

EMR pricing is simple and predictable: You pay a per-instance rate for every second used, with a one-minute minimum charge. You can launch a 10-node EMR cluster with applications such as Hadoop, Spark, and Hive, for as little as $0.15 per hour. Because EMR has native support for Amazon EC2 Spot and Reserved Instances, you can also save 50-80% on the cost of the underlying instances.

With EMR, you can provision one, hundreds, or thousands of compute instances to process data at any scale. You can easily increase or decrease the number of instances manually or with Auto Scaling, and you only pay for what you use. EMR also decouples compute instances and persistent storage, so they can be scaled independently.

You can spend less time tuning and monitoring your cluster. EMR has tuned Hadoop for the cloud; it also monitors your cluster — retrying failed tasks and automatically replacing poorly performing instances. EMR provides the latest stable open source software releases, so you don’t have to manage updates and bug fixes, leading to fewer issues and less effort to maintain the environment.

EMR automatically configures EC2 firewall settings that control network access to instances, and you can launch clusters in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), a logically isolated network you define. For objects stored in S3, you can use S3 server-side encryption or Amazon S3 client-side encryption with EMRFS, with AWS Key Management Service or customer-managed keys. You can also easily enable other encryption options and authentication with Kerberos.

You have complete control over your cluster. You have root access to every instance, you can easily install additional applications, and you can customize every cluster with bootstrap actions. You can also launch EMR clusters with custom Amazon Linux AMIs.