Cloud computing is the paradigm that has made computing a utility. Just like electricity grids and water supply channels bring electricity and water, to individual homes, cloud computing allows individuals and businesses—small, medium, and large—to tap into pooled computing resources connected via a network to execute desired tasks and run their applications.
In this chapter, we will be:
Looking at the characteristics and advantages of cloud computing
Comparing and contrasting the Hadoop on the cloud offering by Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, two of the leading players in the cloud computing space
Delving into the details of Amazon's managed Hadoop service called Elastic MapReduce (EMR)
Looking at how to provision an EMR cluster within minutes and run MapReduce jobs