Getting Started Guide: Analyzing Big Data with AWS

Big data—data sets that are too large to store in a traditional relational database and that require distributed applications for processing—can be expensive and complicated to manage. Moving your data to the cloud can reduce storage and analysis costs and simplify administration. This guide explains how to use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store big data, Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances (virtual servers) to process it, and Amazon Elastic MapReduce to manage the details of storage, cluster configuration, monitoring, and analysis.