Amazon EMR Serverless now supports Apache Spark 4.0.1 (preview)

Amazon EMR Serverless now supports Apache Spark 4.0.1 (preview). With Spark 4.0.1, you can build and maintain data pipelines more easily with ANSI SQL and VARIANT data types, strengthen compliance and governance frameworks with Apache Iceberg v3 table format, and deploy new real-time applications faster with enhanced streaming capabilities. This enables your teams to reduce technical debt and iterate more quickly, while ensuring data accuracy and consistency. With Spark 4.0.1, you can build data pipelines with standard ANSI SQL, making it accessible to a larger set of users who don't know programming languages like Python or Scala. Spark 4.0.1 natively supports JSON and semi-structured data through VARIANT data types, providing flexibility for handling diverse data formats. You can strengthen compliance and governance through Apache Iceberg v3 table format, which provides transaction guarantees and tracks how your data changes over time, creating the audit trails you need for regulatory requirements. You can deploy real-time applications faster with improved streaming controls that let you manage complex stateful operations and monitor streaming jobs more easily. With this capability, you can support use cases like fraud detection and real-time personalization. Apache Spark 4.0.1 is available in preview in all regions where EMR Serverless is available, excluding China and AWS GovCloud (US) regions. To learn more about Apache Spark 4.0.1 on Amazon EMR, visit the [Amazon EMR Serverless release notes](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/EMR-Serverless-UserGuide/release-version-emr-spark-8.0-preview.html), or get started by creating an EMR application with Spark 4.0.1 from the [AWS Management Console](https://console.aws.amazon.com/emr/serverless).