How to stop EMR Cluster without terminating it?

Question

I know it is possible to stop individual EC2 instances, but what about the EMR cluster?

If I stop all EC2 instances comprising EMR cluster, would I still be billed?

Answer 1

At this time there is not a way to STOP and EMR cluster in the same sense you can with EC2 instances. The EMR cluster uses instance-store volumes and the EC2 start/stop feature relies on the use of EBS volumes which are not appropriate for high-performance, low-latency HDFS utilization.

The best way to simulate this behavior is to store the data in S3 and then just ingest as a start up step of the cluster then save back to S3 when done.