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Amazon Web Services has introduced the public beta of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a cloud computing service that allows businesses, researchers, data analysts and developers to process large amounts of data.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce uses Hadoop, a free Java software framework that runs on the company's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). Customers can use MapReduce to perform data-intensive tasks for distributed applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, financial analysis and bioinformatics research.

Customers will pay only for what they use with no up-front payments or commitments.

"Some researchers and developers already run Hadoop on Amazon EC2, and many of them have asked for even simpler tools for large-scale data analysis," said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services.

"Amazon Elastic MapReduce makes crunching in the cloud much easier as it dramatically reduces the time, effort, complexity and cost of performing data-intensive tasks."

The service automatically launches and configures the number and type of EC2 instances that a customer selects. It then kicks off a Hadoop implementation of the MapReduce programming model, which loads large amounts of user input data from S3 and subdivides it for parallel processing. Users can manage and monitor job flows through web service APIs or via AWS Management Console.