Elastic MapReduce allows users to outsource the complexities of running Hadoop clusters on Amazon Web Services. It provides a simple API and command line tools to define and run MapReduce jobs on AWS resources without having to manage servers or clusters. Users can write mappers/reducers, upload input data to S3, and have AWS automatically scale a Hadoop cluster to process the data and return results. This makes big data processing with Hadoop very accessible without having to deal with infrastructure management.