Welcome

This guide is for developers and for the community of researchers and data analysts that need to process vast amounts of data efficiently and cost-effectively. Because this guide uses the Amazon Elastic MapReduce console, you do not need to be a programmer to use this guide.

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This guide is organized as a high-level introduction and tutorial. It is divided into several major sections that enable you to practice using Elastic MapReduce. Each section builds on the previous sections, so if you read and work through the examples in sequence, you'll get a basic understanding of Elastic MapReduce.

Depending on your AWS programming experience, you can use this guide in the following ways.

If you are new to AWS

Read the entire guide. It takes you step-by-step through the process of using Elastic MapReduce to run a Hadoop job flow.

If you have developed applications for other AWS services and know Amazon S3 basics

You can skip most of the Getting Set Up section. Just sign up to use Elastic MapReduce and move on to the tutorial or implementation sections. For more information about signing up for Elastic MapReduce, see How to Get an Elastic MapReduce Developer Account.

If you want to use the Elastic MapReduce API and not the Console

You can skip to the implementation section that lists many different ways to get in-depth knowledge of Elastic MapReduce that go beyond the scope of this guide. To skip to more advanced topics, see Where Do I Go from Here?.

Each section of this guide builds on those that precede it. For that reason, you should read the sections in the order they are presented.

The following table lists related resources that you'll find useful as you work with this service.