Amazon Web Services (AWS) has updated its Elastic Map Reduce platform with a new version of Hadoop and updated support for its data analytics ecosystem.

Elastic Map Reduce is AWS platform for processing large amounts of data. But unlike many vendors, AWS offers a hosted service. The challenge for AWS is to keep Hadoop and its accompanying ecosystem updated and in pace with the latest open-source platforms.

In this latest update, AWS updated to Hadoop 2.2 and new versions of Hive, Pig, HBase, and Mahout, all accompanying technologies for Hadoop.  In a blog post, AWS states that it cluster startup times have been reduced, the ability to augment data has been augmented and mapper M7 is now supported. MapR M7 is a premium offering for HBase, the NoSQL database built for Hadoop.

The update to Elastic Map Reduce also includes supports for YARN, the next generation Hadoop MapReduce architecture.

This is a major update for AWS. it’s as much about Hadoop as it is about the ecosystem that has come so far in the past few years. Hadoop is a file-based system that need HBase for a database. Pig an analytics platform that is often used for ETL (Extract / Transform / Load) processing and Mahout is a machine-learning library.

AWS has increasing support for its analytics technology. That’s illustrated in the news last week that business intelligence provider Jaspersoft now supports Elastic Map Reduce. The company has a history with AWS, boasting 500 customers that use its service available on the AWS Marketplace.