Which service provides control-plane operations for creating, updating, and deleting clusters?

Which service provides control-plane operations for creating, updating, and deleting clusters?

• A. AWS Lake Formation
• B. Amazon EMR
• C. AWS Glue
• D. Amazon Athena

Answer: (B)

Cluster lifecycle management is the key idea here. Amazon EMR is designed to provision, configure, scale, and terminate Hadoop/Spark clusters, which are the control-plane operations you perform to create, update (resize or reconfigure), and delete clusters. It handles the lifecycle of the cluster itself—the master and core nodes, the software stack (Hadoop, Spark, etc.), and the cluster’s settings. The other services focus on different parts of the data ecosystem. AWS Lake Formation governs data lake access and permissions, not cluster lifecycle. AWS Glue provides ETL capabilities and a data catalog, not cluster management. Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that runs SQL against data in S3; it doesn’t create or manage clusters. So for managing the lifecycle of clusters, EMR is the appropriate choice.

Cluster lifecycle management is the key idea here. Amazon EMR is designed to provision, configure, scale, and terminate Hadoop/Spark clusters, which are the control-plane operations you perform to create, update (resize or reconfigure), and delete clusters. It handles the lifecycle of the cluster itself—the master and core nodes, the software stack (Hadoop, Spark, etc.), and the cluster’s settings.

The other services focus on different parts of the data ecosystem. AWS Lake Formation governs data lake access and permissions, not cluster lifecycle. AWS Glue provides ETL capabilities and a data catalog, not cluster management. Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that runs SQL against data in S3; it doesn’t create or manage clusters. So for managing the lifecycle of clusters, EMR is the appropriate choice.