E-MapReduce (EMR) provides an integrated solution to manage clusters, which frees you up from the complex management of clusters. EMR has some practical strength over self-managed clusters.

Ease of use

You can simply select the ECS instance specifications, disks, and software, and trigger automated deployment.
Note EMR supports all of the regions supported by Alibaba Cloud ECS. For more information, see Regions and zones.

Low price

You can create a cluster as required and release it if it is no longer needed. You can also dynamically add a node to a cluster.

Deep integration

EMR is integrated with other Alibaba Cloud services such as Object Storage Service (OSS), Message Service (MNS), ApsaraDB Relational Database Service (RDS), and MaxCompute. This enables these services to act as the input source or output destination of the Hadoop or Spark compute engine in EMR.

Security

EMR is integrated with Resource Access Management (RAM), which allows you to use Alibaba Cloud accounts and RAM users to isolate permissions on services.