In this chapter, we will explore several mechanisms to deploy and execute Hadoop MapReduce v2 and other Hadoop-related computations on cloud environments.

Cloud computing environments such as Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure provide on-demand compute and storage resources as a service over the Web. These cloud computing environments enable us to perform occasional large-scale Hadoop computations without an upfront capital investment and require us to pay only for the actual usage. Another advantage of using cloud environments is the ability to increase the throughput of the Hadoop computations by horizontally scaling the number of computing resources with minimal additional cost. For an example, the cost for using 10 cloud instances for 100 hours equals the cost of using 100 cloud instances for 10 hours. In addition to storage, compute, and hosted MapReduce services, these cloud environments provide many other distributed computing services as well, which you may find useful when...