Customizable Security Groups and Multiple Task Instances Now Available for Amazon EMR
You can now control the security rules for your cluster by specifying your own Amazon EC2 security groups. Customizing the security groups for Amazon EMR, you can prevent communication between clusters, grant an external application access to one cluster but not another, and apply multiple security groups to a given cluster. To learn more, visit the documentation.
You also now have the ability to provision multiple task instance groups for your cluster. With the option to have up to 48 task instance groups per cluster, you can leverage different instance types as task instances -- that is, instances that run jobs but do not store data in Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). This is especially useful if you use Amazon EC2 Spot instances. If there are not enough Spot Instances available for a particular instance type, you can create an additional task group that leverages a different instance type with available Spot Instance capacity. Lastly, you can now view the current EC2 Spot price from the AWS Management Console. Visit the documentation for more information about task instance groups.