Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) vs. Microsoft Azure

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon EMR
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Amazon EMR is a cloud-native big data platform for processing vast amounts of data quickly, at scale. Using open source tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache HBase, Apache Flink, Apache Hudi (Incubating), and Presto, coupled with the scalability of Amazon EC2 and scalable storage of Amazon S3, EMR gives analytical teams the engines and elasticity to run Petabyte-scale analysis.N/A
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
$29
per month
Pricing
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Microsoft Azure
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon EMRMicrosoft Azure
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsThe free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Microsoft Azure
Considered Both Products
Amazon EMR
Chose Amazon EMR
Snowflake is a lot easier to get started with than the other options. Snowflake's data lake building capabilities are far more powerful. Although Amazon EMR isn't our first pick, we've had an excellent experience with EC2 and S3. Because of our current API interfaces, it made …
Chose Amazon EMR
1. Amazon EMR was faster than Google BigQuery and this made a difference when the amount of data was really large.
2. Amazon EMR was costlier than Google BigQuery so it was difficult to manage budget.
3. Amazon EMR has excellent integrations with other technologies.
Chose Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) compares well against Microsoft Azure and Microsoft SQL servers in terms of performance and ease of use. This also means you pay more for the service. Amazon EMR is a great tool for handling large amounts of data. SQL Server would be a better …
Chose Amazon EMR
Compared to IBM Analytics Engine, Amazon EMR is a much cheaper option to get the work down. And compared to Alluxio, Amazon EMR is much more user-friendly. The drawback is that amazon EMR would be very costly if the run failed.
Chose Amazon EMR
Good choice for startup, open source and cost-effective and saves a lot of setup time.
Run times are reduced to minutes compared to hours on EC2 or other compute servers.
Easy to choose between hadoop or spark based EMR cluster, it can be used in combination with other AWS …
Chose Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) compares well against GCP and Azure - but you need to be careful of the costs involved in spinning up such a cluster. It is easy to configure however and it is my preferred platform to deploy our solutions because of its ease of use.
Chose Amazon EMR
Apache Hadoop required us to do all the leg work and we did not have the resources for that. It was ideal that AWS offers a MapReduce solution as we use it to host various servers. It is one place for all our needs. Very convenient. Apache Hadoop is still a good product but …
Chose Amazon EMR
Compared to Databricks, Amazon EMR is a much cheaper option to get the work down. And compared to Amazon ec2, Amazon EMR is a much more powerful tool to get large datasets transformation down in a fairly short amount of time. The drawback is that amazon EMR would be very costly …
Chose Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR is faster, cheaper, easier, and enjoyed more by our employees compared to Azure HDInsight. We selected Amazon because we saw an advertisement and wanted to try it out to see how it was. We will continue to use it until it is not around or until we find something that …
Chose Amazon EMR
EMR is more suited for developers. Databricks feel more for data science-oriented with its notebooks and customs visualizations. With EMR you can more easily add additional capacity on-damnd on the instance. With others is a more cumbersome process. And then, you can also …
Chose Amazon EMR
The alternatives to EMR are mainly hadoop distributions owned by the 3 companies above. I have not used the other distributions so it is difficult to comment, but the general tradeoff is, at the cost of a longer setup time and more infra management, you get more flexible …
Chose Amazon EMR
Having one of these enterprise edition license comes at its own costs. But, the flexibility to have the cluster spin up with the workbenches and code snippets on the same is really beneficial. Especially, if one had to move out of EMR and consider an option which reduces the …
Chose Amazon EMR
EMR provides dynamic cluster size, lots of documentation, and integration with other Amazon Web Services which are some of the things that Cloudera distribution for Hadoop lacked. Some products are hard to learn but EMR was much easier and helped save time spent on trying to …
Microsoft Azure
Chose Microsoft Azure
Obviously this is just based on the virtualisation part of the product, but VM's in Microsoft Azure are well managable and no need to invest in hardware, which gives it an edge in a time where the need for VM's is getting less and less.
Chose Microsoft Azure
I feel that Microsoft Azure typically outperforms Google Cloud Platform in hybrid cloud capabilities, integration aspects, and, primarily, security compliance features. Azure offered superior integration with Microsoft's enterprise software ecosystem, and it's second to none in …
Chose Microsoft Azure
Mostly due to the ecosystem. I don't think there is anything in AWS that we would be missing out when using Microsoft Azure. We use Microsoft products on on-premise servers and also M365 / Office services that are well supported in Microsoft Azure. The pricing between AWS and …
Chose Microsoft Azure
AWS is good for linux virtual machines and mac virtual machines, Microsoft Azure doesn't do mac VMs. However, in my opinion Microsoft Azure is better in every other aspect, easier to use and just as cost effective.
Chose Microsoft Azure
AWS takes the cake here just due to how simple it is to configure IAM roles, users, and policies. Microsoft Azure is nearly neck-and-neck and could probably overtake them in the near future. Splunk for logging isn't that great and Microsoft Azure does a solid job but they could …
Chose Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is a comprehensive platform that offers almost all functionalities and can provide even more. Due to ongoing extensive developments, additional functionalities are continuously being added and improved. Many new functionalities are also being added that are …
Chose Microsoft Azure
While Azure is a solid and robust platform, VMWare is a much better product with greater usability and features.
Chose Microsoft Azure
Azure works well with the items selected above - ex. Barracuda for backups. Integration is simple and functions.
Chose Microsoft Azure
Azure is more user friendly and provides much required scalability and flexibility.
Chose Microsoft Azure
AWS is the most stable cloud options but Azure has done well in last few years and provides good options specifically for Microsoft customers and who are more familiar with Microsoft technologies like WINDOWS, MS SQL SERVER, GITHUB, VISUAL STUDIO etc. Google cloud is more …
Chose Microsoft Azure
Azure is an ideal platform for disaster recovery and backup. It is very flexible because of its site regeneration capabilities and other features. All of our data can be backup, regardless of the language or operating system. Azure’s inherent flexibility comes from its status …
Chose Microsoft Azure
Remote accessibility for the mass people from the different places where both free and premium service is available that's why people choose Microsoft Azure. The main reason of switching from that to Microsoft Azure is the cost of operation and operating flexibility. The …
Chose Microsoft Azure
AWS and Azure are distinct classes, regardless of how we view them or which sub-areas. Their capabilities are the most comprehensive and sophisticated. Azure will benefit existing Microsoft customers, but AWS has a slight market share advantage. Microsoft Azure offers many …
Chose Microsoft Azure
Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform
Chose Microsoft Azure
Ease of use. Multiple Data centers across the globe. Load management. Backup and recovery options.
Chose Microsoft Azure
Because Microsoft Azure has more integrations and possibilities. Also most of the biggest companies are using it, so it gives the security and the back up to trust and work with confidence.
Chose Microsoft Azure
As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" …
Chose Microsoft Azure
We actually utilized multiple cloud stacks, depending upon the customer environment and need. Those that heavily used MS products (Office on-prem or 365), Teams, etc, found it a better fit, with easier integration, for their needs.
Chose Microsoft Azure
I would say that Azure stacks up pretty good and sometimes better in comparison to what Google Cloud Platform has to offer. I don't like GCP for its absurd licensing fees and it's expensive for just Using EC2 Instances. However, DigitalOcean and AWS can offer far better …
Chose Microsoft Azure
The most common alternatives are Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. AWS is known for its non-existent customer support and abysmal documentation - Azure is clearly better on both fronts. Google Cloud Platform is a solid product, but in my experience Azure Functions …
Chose Microsoft Azure
Integration with other Microsoft products makes Azure stand out quite a bit. However, if you need to use open source software and to integrate with Linux systems then AWS or Google Cloud might be better alternatives. Google did not even come close to Azure in terms of …
Chose Microsoft Azure
Evaluated both AWS and GCP for a similar set of use cases to realize that AWS required additional third-party add ons to be purchased for load balancing vs. Azure's out-of-the-box capabilities offered for free. GCP on the surface was lower cost but the cost of running …
Features
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Microsoft Azure
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)
-
Ratings
Microsoft Azure
8.5
Ratings
6% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
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Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Microsoft Azure
Small Businesses

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User Ratings
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Microsoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.4
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
6.8
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Microsoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
We are running it to perform preparation which takes a few hours on EC2 to be running on a spark-based EMR cluster to total the preparation inside minutes rather than a few hours. Ease of utilization and capacity to select from either Hadoop or spark. Processing time diminishes from 5-8 hours to 25-30 minutes compared with the Ec2 occurrence and more in a few cases.
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Actually, migrating to Microsoft Azure is a good solution for almost any situation, especially when all components of your network are ready to become cloud-based. The only drawback I personally encounter frequently is that older software packages cannot always be easily picked up and moved to Microsoft Azure in an optimal manner.
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Pros
  • The cluster size of MapReduce is very dynamic and therefore scalability is good for EMR.
  • It also works well with other Amazon Web Services like Amazon Simple Storage Service, which means that data can be taken from those services and written back to them.
  • I tried using the in-house hosting at the university I work in, but there would be a lot of complications with technical support required. For Amazon, the support and documentation was good to solve these problems faster.
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  • Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
  • Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
  • BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
  • Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.
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Cons
  • Sometimes bootstrapping certain tools comes with debugging costs. The tools provided by some of the enterprise editions are great compared to EMR.
  • Like some of the enterprise editions EMR does not provide on premises options.
  • No UI client for saving the workbooks or code snippets. Everything has to go through submitting process. Not really convenient for tracking the job as well.
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  • In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
  • Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
  • Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
We have been very satisfied with Windows Azure and now a lot of our business depends on it as more teams are now deploying their applications into Azure. Our next step is to have our Infrastructure team move their resources to Azure. It will take awhile for that to happen but we are positive that it will.
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Usability
Documentation is quite good and the product is regularly updated, so new features regularly come out. The setup is straightforward enough, especially once you have already established the overall platform infrastructure and the aws-cli APIs are easy enough to use. It would be nice to have some out-of-the-box integrations for checking logs and the Spark UI, rather than relying on know-how and digging through multiple levels to find the informations
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Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
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Support Rating
I give the overall support for Amazon EMR this rating because while the support technicians are very knowledgeable and always able to help, it sometimes takes a very long time to get in contact with one of the support technicians. So overall the support is pretty good for Amazon EMR.
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Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
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Alternatives Considered
Snowflake is a lot easier to get started with than the other options. Snowflake's data lake building capabilities are far more powerful. Although Amazon EMR isn't our first pick, we've had an excellent experience with EC2 and S3. Because of our current API interfaces, it made more sense for us to continue with Hadoop rather than explore other options.
Read full review
I feel that Microsoft Azure typically outperforms Google Cloud Platform in hybrid cloud capabilities, integration aspects, and, primarily, security compliance features. Azure offered superior integration with Microsoft's enterprise software ecosystem, and it's second to none in my opinion. This made it the natural choice for most, especially if heavily invested in Windows, Office 365, or Active Directory deployments. We chose Azure over GCP because we simply needed Windows workload support as a strong driver, more access to global regions, and let's not forget that most tech teams in an organization are Microsoft Certified, which makes skillset transfer from on-prem to cloud a minimal learning curve over shifting to a different provider.
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Return on Investment
  • It was obviously cheaper and convenient to use as most of our data processing and pipelines are on AWS. It was fast and readily available with a click and that saved a ton of time rather than having to figure out the down time of the cluster if its on premises.
  • It saved time on processing chunks of big data which had to be processed in short period with minimal costs. EMR solved this as the cluster setup time and processing was simple, easy, cheap and fast.
  • It had a negative impact as it was very difficult in submitting the test jobs as it lags a UI to submit spark code snippets.
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  • Times and growth went into it. By balancing on-premises maintenance with continuous cloud improvements, we’ve budgeted and planned endlessly increased capacity.
  • In today’s world of cyber-crime, clients can put even more faith in what they’ve heard. We built an innovative single-sign-on hub for all users. Also, other business platforms use Azure application gateways, reducing worker switching time and increasing productivity.
  • Its step can automate to improve the investment. In addition, we can integrate our organization’s credentials into an authorization for other systems.
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