The LTS program guarantees 36 months of support for critical and high-severity fixes at no added cost, allowing customers to maintain Spark workloads on a single release longer and upgrade at their convenience. The current release enhances support with Apache Iceberg v3, adding advanced features such as geospatial data handling and improved schema evolution.
Enhanced access control covers more Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake operations, while Spark Connect endpoints now support token-based authentication on Amazon EMR on EKS clusters. This release is broadly available across all AWS regions supporting Amazon EMR variants.
Source & further reading
Amazon EMR introduces Long Term Support with Apache Spark 4.1 ↗Source published 2026-09-22. This report was prepared with AI assistance from the linked primary-source material. Claims and limitations should be checked against the original announcement or research.