5 Comments

I don't get where this 50% comes from? When I take the full list of the prices (https://aws.amazon.com/emr/pricing/), I get as low as 1,10% EMR cost for p3.16xlarge and the highest is 30,77% for g2.2xlarge.

There's a bunch of instance types that don't make sense in an EMR cluster, in my experience the EMR markup is rather ~10-15% on average, which seem rather OK for the service it offers.

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50% surcharge coming from the assumption that EMR running on spot instances

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Ok that makes more sense, thanks for clarifying. Still though, when I do the math assuming Spot market saves you 67% of the price, I get that for i3.16xlarge (the instance we use the most, with EMR fee $0,27):

- On-demand $4,9920: 5,41% EMR markup

- Spot: $1,6474: 16,39% EMR markup

Indeed it adds up, but it's rare to get an average of 67% discount all-the-time with no fallback on on-demand.

Anyway, I think the bottomline of your article is: most instance types do not make economical sense to use in EMR, pick wisely.

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On top of choosing the instance type wisely, my other question is which proprietary software from AWS requires the per-instance pricing!!! In comparison with the EKS cluster, which requires only per cluster fee.

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Indeed, sorry it feels I missed your point but I'm not. My rationale is that I get value for my money with AWS packaging coherent set of tools that just require me changing a variable to migrate, provided I use an appropriate instance type that contains the relative EMR markup in an acceptable bracket (10-15% in my case).

There's no license cost or whatever that would justify paying 50% markup.

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