# Amazon EMR adds 36-month support releases for Apache Spark workloads

_Published Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 9:09 PM EDT · Infrastructure, Products · Latest · Tier 2 — Notable_

AWS introduced long-term-support releases for Amazon EMR, beginning with emr-spark-8.1.0 and Apache Spark 4.1. Designated runtime versions will receive fixes for critical and high-severity security, software and data-corruption problems for 36 months at no additional cost.

The release also supports Apache Iceberg v3, named and cross-account catalogs, broader fine-grained permissions and token-authenticated Spark Connect endpoints on EMR on EKS. It is available across EMR on EC2, EKS and Serverless in every AWS Region offering EMR, although fixes remain subject to availability.

## Sources

- [Recent Announcements](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/09/amazon-emr-long-term-support-spark-4-1/)

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Canonical: https://techandbusiness.org/newswire/I4JOZ6yPpnR4oxFEDDpA-Y
Published: 2026-09-23T01:09:05.512Z
Story chronology: 2026-09-22T08:00:00.000Z
Retrieved: 2026-09-23T03:24:32.225Z
Publisher: Tech & Business (techandbusiness.org)