Friday, April 10, 2009

Amazon Elastic MapReduce(Beta)

In one of my earlier posts, I’ve mentioned some of the purposes for which enterprises can use cloud environments, even in their current ‘immature’ form. The key I think is exploring how we can use them for information processing capabilities such as performance benchmarking, fault tolerance testing etc. I think the newly released Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Beta) is a platform that exactly serves this purpose. Though I’m no expert on Map-Reduce or functional programming for that matter, from what I understand, this is the best method for crunching large amount of data and extracting key information out of it(We all know what Google does with it; don’t we).

Another key enterprise use for this platform is for business intelligence systems, as rightly mentioned in the Amazon article. Also organizations that process large amount of data in batches need not wait for doing that now at end of day; they can now be done more real-time, during business hours itself. We need no MBA to know that the faster you can process information; the better your business gains will be. I think the potential is also immense for companies that do image processing etc. Agree, programmers will have to do some work to get things done rightly, still this is a good example for demonstrating how cloud based computing will work for the enterprise, even in its present form.

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