According to instance-types.html, at Feb 12, 2013, we can use 18 instance types.

On AWS EMR, we can specify any types using the SDK or REST API. Then AWS provides a configuration script for memory. It’s hemory-intensive and there is a description for it here. That script configures the properties of Hadoop for memory based on the instance type you selected, however, then you use only 8 types if you use the script according to the description.

There are next types:

m1.small
m1.large
m1.xlarge
c1.medium
c1.xlarge
m2.xlarge
m2.2xlarge
m2.4xlarge

If you set up memory-intensive in bootstrap actions of EMR and use types which it doesn’t support, The job flow you kicked must be failed at memory-intensive step.

A few days ago, I didn’t know that. I tried to use m1.medium, it was failed and I wasted lots of time to check the cause :(

Take care of this!

|-------------+---------------------------|

type	memory-intensive support?
m1.small	YES
m1.medium	NO
m1.large	YES
m1.xlarge	YES
c1.medium	YES
c1.xlarge	YES
m2.xlarge	YES
m2.2xlarge	YES
m2.4xlarge	YES
cc1.4xlarge	NO
cc2.8xlarge	NO
cg1.4xlarge	NO
cr1.8xlarge	NO
hi1.4xlarge	NO
hs1.8xlarge	NO
m3.xlarge	NO
m3.2xlarge	NO
t1.micro	NO
-------------	-----
{:.table .table-condensed}