# What is Amazon EMR? Amazon EMR, which was previously called Amazon Elastic MapReduce, is a managed cluster platform that simplifies running big data frameworks, such as [Apache Hadoop](http://www.amazonaws.cn/elasticmapreduce/details/hadoop) and [Apache Spark](http://www.amazonaws.cn/elasticmapreduce/details/spark), on Amazon to process and analyze vast amounts of data. Using these frameworks and related open-source projects, you can process data for analytics purposes and business intelligence workloads. Amazon EMR also lets you transform and move large amounts of data into and out of other Amazon data stores and databases, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon DynamoDB. If you are a first-time user of Amazon EMR, we recommend that you begin by reading the following, in addition to this section: + [Amazon EMR](http://www.amazonaws.cn/elasticmapreduce/) – This service page provides Amazon EMR highlights, product details, and pricing information. + [Tutorial: Getting started with Amazon EMR](emr-gs.md) – This tutorial gets you started using Amazon EMR quickly. **Topics** + [Understanding how to create and work with Amazon EMR clusters](emr-overview.md) + [Benefits of using Amazon EMR](emr-overview-benefits.md) + [Amazon EMR architecture and service layers](emr-overview-arch.md)