Write Applications that Launch and Manage Clusters

There are two ways you can programmatically call the functionality exposed by the Amazon EMR API: submit a Query request over HTTP/HTTPS, or call wrapper functions in one of the AWS SDKs.

Calling the APIs using a Query request provides the lowest-level access to the APIs, but at the cost of having to write code to manage connection details, such as calculating the hash to sign the request, error handling, and retry requests. However, by using Query requests directly, you have access to the full functionality of the web service and can use any programming language. For more information about how to call Amazon EMR using a Query request, see Use Query Requests to Call Amazon EMR APIs.

The AWS SDKs provide language-specific functions that wrap the web service's API and simplify connecting to the web service, handling many of the connection details for you. The trade-off is that an SDK may not exist for the language you wish to use, and the entire API may not be represented in the wrapper functions. You can work around this last limitation by using the SDK wrapper functions to create and submit a Query request.. For more information about calling Amazon EMR using one of the SDKs, see Use SDKs to Call Amazon EMR APIs.