[vosper]

We've had a lot of success with EMR as well - we have an hourly Pig job that produces data for our analytics database. It's not a particularly complex script, but our traffic volume is unpredictable so it's reassuring to know that we can add resources to a slow job and have it finish faster.

The downside of EMR is that it can be fairly expensive once you start needing the beefy machines. We're lucky that we can afford to have our analytics delayed an hour or two and can thus run on Spot instances (except for the Master node). When we move to a streaming architecture I'm not sure EMR will still be competitive, since we won't be able to have those machines go away on us.

Edit: clarity.