AWS' EMR vs EC2 pricing confusion

Question

https://aws.amazon.com/emr/pricing/ Can someone explain why the price for EMR and EC2 differs so much, we are considering whether build our spark cluster on EMR or using Clourdera on EC2. Did I miss anything obvious? Thanks

Answer 1

What is EMR?

Amazon EMR provides a managed Hadoop framework that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective to process vast amounts of data across dynamically scalable Amazon EC2 instances.

What is EC2?

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.

Now, what is EMR pricing?

EMR pricing is essentially the price you pay for "Cluster Management" related computing.

In a big data setup, cluster computing is not enough, you need "node computing" too, that is where EC2 and it's pricing comes into picture.

As explained in EMR Pricing documentation, you will be charged for both EMR computing & EC2 computing when you use EMR.

The Amazon EMR price is in addition to the Amazon EC2 price (the price for the underlying servers). There are a variety of Amazon EC2 pricing options you can choose from, including On-Demand (shown below), 1 year & 3 year Reserved Instances, and Spot instances.

Why the pricing different?

It depends on what type of service & hardware being used and ultimately only AWS team can answer.