Exploring alternate implementations

While you may find great success implementing your serverless MapReduce system, there are alternatives that still fall under the serverless umbrella or leverage managed services, which should give you a high degree of confidence. I'll talk through some of the other systems or techniques you should consider when working on your own data analysis.

AWS Athena

AWS Athena is a relatively new service from AWS. Of course, this is specific to AWS, but other cloud providers may offer comparable services. Athena gives you the ability to write SQL queries to analyze data stored on S3. Before you can analyze your data with SQL, you must create a virtual database with associated tables across your structured or semi-structured S3 files. You may create these tables manually or with another AWS service called Glue.

I won't go into all of the details of setting up a new Athena database or tables but will show you the results and ease of use after you've set those up. In...