Programming Elastic MapReduce

Chapter 6. Planning AWS Projects and Managing Costs

Throughout the earlier chapters, we explored how to use Amazon EMR, S3, and EC2 to analyze data. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at the project costs of these components, along with a number of the key factors to consider when building a new project or moving an existing project to AWS. There are many benefits to moving an application into AWS, but they need to be weighed against the real-world dependencies that can be encountered in a project.

Developing a Project Cost Model

Whether a company is building a new application or moving an existing application to AWS, developing a model of the costs that will be incurred can help the business understand if moving to AWS and EMR is the right strategy. It may also highlight which components of the application it makes sense to run in AWS and which components will be run most cost effectively in an existing in-house infrastructure.

In most existing applications, the current infrastructure and software licensing can affect the costs and options available in building and operating an application in AWS. In this section, we’ll compare these costs against the similar factors in AWS to help you best determine the solution that meets your project’s needs. We’ll also help you determine key factors to consider in your application development plan and how to estimate and minimize the operational costs of your project.

Software Licensing

The data analysis building blocks covered in this book made ...