elastic-map-reduce

I have tried a simple Map/Reduce task using Amazon Elastic MapReduce and it took just 3 mins to complete the task. Is it possible to re-use the same instance to run another task. Even though I have just used the instance for 3 mins Amazon will charge for 1 hr , so I want to use the balance 57 mins to run several other tasks. Matthew Rathbone The answer is yes. here's how you do it using the command line client: When you create an instance pass the --alive flag, this tells emr to keep the cluster around after your job has run. Then you can submit more tasks to the cluster: elastic-mapreduce -

It has been suggested on Amazon docs http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/ among other places, that you can backup your dynamodb tables using Elastic Map Reduce, I have a general understanding of how this could work but I couldn't find any guides or tutorials on this, So my question is how can I automate dynamodb backups (using EMR)? So far, I think I need to create a "streaming" job with a map function that reads the data from dynamodb and a reduce that writes it to S3 and I believe these could be written in Python (or java or a few other languages). Any comments, clarifications, code samples,