AWS Big Data Blog

Category: Announcements

Announcing Spark Connect on Amazon EMR Serverless: Interactive PySpark development, anywhere

Today, AWS is announcing support for Spark Connect on Amazon EMR Serverless with EMR release 7.13 (Apache Spark 3.5.6) and later versions. You can now build and debug Spark applications from your preferred local environment while running full-scale Spark operations on EMR Serverless.

Announcing general availability of Apache Spark 4.0 on Amazon EMR

With this general availability announcement, Spark 4.0 is now supported across Amazon EMR Serverless, Amazon EMR on EC2, and Amazon EMR on EKS deployment options. In this post, you’ll learn about key Spark 4.0 capabilities now available on Amazon EMR including Spark Connect, the Variant data type, SQL scripting, Python API improvements, and streaming enhancements, along with infrastructure changes in the new emr-spark-8.0 release.

Unlock cost savings with incremental snapshot billing for Amazon Redshift Serverless and Amazon Redshift RG

Starting June 8, 2026, Amazon Redshift is introducing an incremental snapshot billing model for Amazon Redshift Serverless and Amazon Redshift RG (provisioned instances powered by AWS Graviton). With this enhancement, you pay only for the unique data blocks across your active manual snapshots within your account. This delivers significant cost savings for customers who have multiple snapshots that contain largely identical data blocks. In this post, you will learn how the new incremental snapshot billing model works, the customer use cases it addresses, and how it helps you optimize costs while improving your Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

The next generation of Amazon OpenSearch Serverless: Built from the ground up for agents

Today, we are announcing a ground-up re-architecture of Amazon OpenSearch Serverless that delivers up to 20 times faster autoscaling, scale to zero, and up to 60% lower cost than provisioning clusters for peak load. Amazon OpenSearch Service is a fully managed, open source retrieval engine that unifies vector, lexical, hybrid, and agentic search, delivering low-latency, accurate and relevant results. Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is an automatically scaled deployment option. The new architecture decouples compute from storage. The service provisions infrastructure in seconds instead of minutes, and scales compute all the way to zero when your application is idle. In this post, we walk through the new architecture, what it means for your applications, and how to get started with a hands-on tutorial.

Automate deployment of data and AI applications with Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio CI/CD CLI

The CI/CD CLI for Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio (aws-smus-cicd-cli) is an open source command line tool that automates deployment of multi-service data and AI applications across pipeline stages. Data teams define their application once in a YAML manifest, DevOps teams deploy with a single command, and the CLI handles configuration substitution, dependency ordering, and resource provisioning automatically. In this post, we walk through how the CI/CD CLI works, show you how to deploy a real application across environments, and demonstrate how it fits into your existing CI/CD workflows.

Build streaming applications on Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink with AI-assisted guidance

In this post, we walk through installing the Power and Skill, using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to build a Kinesis Data Stream-to-Kinesis Data Stream streaming pipeline, and migrating an existing application to Flink 2.2. You can follow along with this use case to see how the Managed Service for Apache Flink Kiro Power can help you build a resilient, performant application grounded in best practices.

Migrate third-party and self-managed Apache Kafka clusters to Amazon MSK Express brokers with Amazon MSK Replicator

In this post, we walk you through how to replicate Apache Kafka data from your external Apache Kafka deployments to Amazon MSK Express brokers using MSK Replicator. You will learn how to configure authentication on your external cluster, establish network connectivity, set up bidirectional replication, and monitor replication health to achieve a low-downtime migration.

Filter catalog assets using custom metadata search filters in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio

Finding the right data assets in large enterprise catalogs can be challenging, especially when thousands of datasets are cataloged with organization-specific metadata. Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now supports custom metadata search filters. In this post, you learn how to create custom metadata forms, publish assets with metadata values, and use structured filters to discover those assets.