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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
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  4. Big Data As A Service
  5. Amazon EMR vs Azure Synapse

Amazon EMR vs Azure Synapse

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR
Stacks542
Followers682
Votes54
Azure Synapse
Azure Synapse
Stacks104
Followers230
Votes10

Amazon EMR vs Azure Synapse: What are the differences?

Introduction

Here we will compare Amazon EMR and Azure Synapse, two widely used big data processing platforms. Both platforms offer scalability and performance for analyzing big data, but they have some key differences in their architecture, features, and integration capabilities.

  1. Architecture: Amazon EMR is built on Apache Hadoop and allows users to run distributed processing frameworks like Hive, Spark, and HBase on a cluster of EC2 instances. On the other hand, Azure Synapse is a unified analytics service that combines big data processing with data warehousing capabilities, enabling users to analyze both structured and unstructured data using scalable resources.

  2. Data Integration: Amazon EMR integrates well with various AWS services such as S3, DynamoDB, and Redshift, allowing seamless data transfer and processing across these services. It also has integration with third-party tools and services. In contrast, Azure Synapse provides seamless integration with the Azure ecosystem, including Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. It also has built-in connectors for popular data sources like Salesforce, SharePoint, and Dynamics 365.

  3. Data Warehousing: While Amazon EMR focuses more on big data processing, Azure Synapse combines big data processing with data warehousing capabilities. Azure Synapse offers a dedicated SQL-based query engine for fast and interactive querying of structured and semi-structured data. It also provides built-in data transformation and data loading capabilities, making it easier to prepare and analyze data for reporting and insights.

  4. Data Lake Analytics: Amazon EMR provides the option to create and utilize data lakes for storing and processing large volumes of data. With EMR, users can leverage tools like AWS Glue for building data catalogs and AWS Athena for interactive querying on data lakes. On the other hand, Azure Synapse integrates with Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, empowering users to leverage its serverless analytics capabilities for on-demand data exploration and processing.

  5. Scalability and Pricing: Both Amazon EMR and Azure Synapse offer scalability, allowing users to scale resources up or down based on their workload requirements. However, the pricing models differ. Amazon EMR pricing is based on the EC2 instances and storage used, while Azure Synapse pricing is based on processing units and data storage. Users should carefully assess their workload and data storage needs to choose the most cost-effective option for their specific use case.

  6. Managed Service: In terms of being a managed service, Amazon EMR provides a highly flexible and customizable platform where users have more control over configuring and managing the infrastructure. Azure Synapse, on the other hand, provides a fully managed service that abstracts away much of the infrastructure management, allowing users to focus more on data analysis and insights.

In summary, while both Amazon EMR and Azure Synapse offer powerful big data processing capabilities, they differ in terms of architecture, data integration options, data warehousing capabilities, data lake analytics, scalability and pricing models, as well as managed service offerings. Choosing the right platform depends on specific requirements, existing infrastructure, and preference for customization versus ease of management.

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Detailed Comparison

Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR
Azure Synapse
Azure Synapse

It is used in a variety of applications, including log analysis, data warehousing, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics.

It is an analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources—at scale. It brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.

Elastic- Amazon EMR enables you to quickly and easily provision as much capacity as you need and add or remove capacity at any time. Deploy multiple clusters or resize a running cluster;Low Cost- Amazon EMR is designed to reduce the cost of processing large amounts of data. Some of the features that make it low cost include low hourly pricing, Amazon EC2 Spot integration, Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance integration, elasticity, and Amazon S3 integration.;Flexible Data Stores- With Amazon EMR, you can leverage multiple data stores, including Amazon S3, the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), and Amazon DynamoDB.;Hadoop Tools- EMR supports powerful and proven Hadoop tools such as Hive, Pig, and HBase.
Complete T-SQL based analytics – Generally Available; Deeply integrated Apache Spark; Hybrid data integration; Unified user experience
Statistics
Stacks
542
Stacks
104
Followers
682
Followers
230
Votes
54
Votes
10
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 15
    On demand processing power
  • 12
    Don't need to maintain Hadoop Cluster yourself
  • 7
    Hadoop Tools
  • 6
    Elastic
  • 4
    Backed by Amazon
Pros
  • 4
    ETL
  • 3
    Security
  • 2
    Serverless
  • 1
    Doesn't support cross database query
Cons
  • 1
    Concurrency
  • 1
    Dictionary Size Limitation - CCI

What are some alternatives to Amazon EMR, Azure Synapse?

Metabase

Metabase

It is an easy way to generate charts and dashboards, ask simple ad hoc queries without using SQL, and see detailed information about rows in your Database. You can set it up in under 5 minutes, and then give yourself and others a place to ask simple questions and understand the data your application is generating.

Google BigQuery

Google BigQuery

Run super-fast, SQL-like queries against terabytes of data in seconds, using the processing power of Google's infrastructure. Load data with ease. Bulk load your data using Google Cloud Storage or stream it in. Easy access. Access BigQuery by using a browser tool, a command-line tool, or by making calls to the BigQuery REST API with client libraries such as Java, PHP or Python.

Apache Spark

Apache Spark

Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.

Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift

It is optimized for data sets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.

Qubole

Qubole

Qubole is a cloud based service that makes big data easy for analysts and data engineers.

Presto

Presto

Distributed SQL Query Engine for Big Data

Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

Superset

Superset

Superset's main goal is to make it easy to slice, dice and visualize data. It empowers users to perform analytics at the speed of thought.

Apache Flink

Apache Flink

Apache Flink is an open source system for fast and versatile data analytics in clusters. Flink supports batch and streaming analytics, in one system. Analytical programs can be written in concise and elegant APIs in Java and Scala.

lakeFS

lakeFS

It is an open-source data version control system for data lakes. It provides a “Git for data” platform enabling you to implement best practices from software engineering on your data lake, including branching and merging, CI/CD, and production-like dev/test environments.

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