Run Apache Spark And Iceberg 4.5X Faster Than Open Source Spark With Amazon EM
AWS, Saturday, November 29th, 2025
This post shows how Amazon EMR 7.12 can make your Apache Spark and Iceberg workloads up to 4.5x faster performance.
The Amazon EMR runtime for Apache Spark provides a high-performance runtime environment with full API compatibility with open source Apache Spark and Apache Iceberg. Amazon EMR on EC2, Amazon EMR Serverless, Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS, Amazon EMR on AWS Outposts and AWS Glue use the optimized runtimes.
Our benchmarks show Amazon EMR 7.12 runs TPC-DS 3 TB workloads 4.5x faster than open source Spark 3.5.6 with Iceberg 1.10.0.