Amazon Web Services introduced Impala as part of the Amazon Elastic MapReduce project. Users will need to run Hadoop clusters that use Hadoop 2.x in order to take advantage of its Hadoop offering. Impala users can run queries on data sets in real time and enjoy low latency times enabled by the platform’s distributed query engine that allows Impala to boast speed and performance benefits over Apache Hive. The availability of Impala on the Amazon Web Services platform comes just weeks after its release of Amazon Kinesis, its platform for collecting and storing real time big data streams, and subsequently underscores the seriousness with which AWS plans to deploy products designed for the big data space.