Posted On: Apr 7, 2023

We are excited to announce support for Apache Spark with Java 11 in EMR on EKS. Amazon EMR on EKS enables customers to run open-source big data frameworks such as Apache Spark on Amazon EKS. AWS customers can now leverage Java 11 as a supported Java runtime to run Spark workloads on Amazon EMR on EKS.

Until now, Amazon EMR on EKS ran Spark with Java 8 as the default Java runtime. In order to run Spark with Java 11, customers will need to create a custom image and install the Java 11 runtime to replace the default Java 8. This required additional engineering effort when the customer first started to use Amazon EMR on EKS and when the customer upgraded to a new release version. With this new feature, Amazon EMR on EKS supports launching Spark with Java 11 runtime by simply passing in a new release label. 

To learn more about this feature, please visit our release documentation. Spark with Java 11 is supported on Amazon EMR on EKS 6.10 release and above, and available in all regions where Amazon EMR on EKS is currently available.