Elastic MapReduce works in conjunction with EC2 and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) hosted storage cloud service. "Elastic MapReduce automatically spins up a Hadoop implementation of the MapReduce framework on Amazon EC2 instances, sub-dividing the data in a job flow into smaller chunks so that they can be processed -- the 'map' function -- in parallel, and eventually recombining the processed data into the final solution -- the 'reduce' function. Amazon S3 serves as the source for the data being analyzed, and as the output destination for the end results," according to a separate .

As with other AWS cloud services, Amazon for Elastic MapReduce based on its usage, without a minimum fee.