This submit exhibits how Amazon EMR 7.12 could make your Apache Spark and Iceberg workloads as much as 4.5x quicker efficiency.
The Amazon EMR runtime for Apache Spark offers a high-performance runtime setting with full API compatibility with open supply 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 present Amazon EMR 7.12 runs TPC-DS 3 TB workloads 4.5x quicker than open supply Spark 3.5.6 with Iceberg 1.10.0.
Efficiency enhancements embrace optimizations for metadata caching, parallel I/O, adaptive question planning, knowledge sort dealing with, and fault tolerance. There have been additionally some Iceberg particular regressions round knowledge scans that we recognized and stuck.
These optimizations allow you to match Parquet efficiency on Amazon EMR whereas holding the important thing options of Iceberg key options: ACID transactions, time journey, and schema evolution.
Benchmark outcomes in comparison with open supply
To evaluate the efficiency of the Spark engine with the Iceberg desk format, we carried out benchmark exams utilizing the 3 TB TPC-DS dataset, model 2.13, a well-liked business customary benchmark. Benchmark exams for the Amazon EMR runtime for Apache Spark and Apache Iceberg had been performed on Amazon EMR 7.12 EC2 clusters in comparison with open supply Apache Spark 3.5.6 and Apache Iceberg 1.10.0 on EC2 clusters.
Observe: Our outcomes derived from the TPC-DS dataset should not instantly similar to the official TPC-DS outcomes as a result of setup variations.
The setup directions and technical particulars can be found in our GitHub repository. To reduce the affect of exterior catalogs like AWS Glue and Hive, we used the Hadoop catalog for the Iceberg tables. This makes use of the underlying file system, particularly Amazon S3, because the catalog. We are able to outline this setup by configuring the property spark.sql.catalog.<catalog_name>.sort. The very fact tables used the default partitioning by the date column, which differ from 200–2,100 partitions. No precalculated statistics had been used for these tables.
We ran a complete of 104 SparkSQL queries in 3 sequential rounds, and the typical runtime of every question throughout these rounds was taken for comparability. The common runtime for the three rounds on Amazon EMR 7.12 with Iceberg enabled was 0.37 hours, demonstrating a 4.5x pace improve in comparison with open supply Spark 3.5.6 and Iceberg 1.10.0. The next determine presents the full runtimes in seconds.

The next desk summarizes the metrics.
| Metric | Amazon EMR 7.12 on EC2 | Amazon EMR 7.5 on EC2 | Open supply Apache Spark 3.5.6 and Apache Iceberg 1.10.0 |
| Common runtime in seconds | 1349.62 | 1535.62 | 6113.92 |
| Geometric imply over queries in seconds | 7.45910 | 8.30046 | 22.31854 |
| Value* | $4.81 | $5.47 | $17.65 |
*Detailed value estimates are mentioned later on this submit.
The next chart demonstrates the per-query efficiency enchancment of Amazon EMR 7.12 relative to open supply Spark 3.5.6 and Iceberg 1.10.0. The extent of the speedup varies from one question to a different, with the quickest as much as 13.6x quicker for q23b, with Amazon EMR outperforming open supply Spark with Iceberg tables. The horizontal axis arranges the TPC-DS 3TB benchmark queries in descending order based mostly on the efficiency enchancment seen with Amazon EMR, and the vertical axis depicts the magnitude of this speedup as a ratio.

Value comparability breakdown
Our benchmark offers the full runtime and geometric imply knowledge to evaluate the efficiency of Spark and Iceberg in a fancy, real-world determination assist state of affairs. For extra insights, we additionally study the associated fee facet. We calculate value estimates utilizing formulation that account for EC2 On-Demand cases, Amazon Elastic Block Retailer (Amazon EBS), and Amazon EMR bills.
- Amazon EC2 value (contains SSD value) = variety of cases * r5d.4xlarge hourly fee * job runtime in hours
- 4xlarge hourly fee = $1.152 per hour
- Root Amazon EBS value = variety of cases * Amazon EBS per GB-hourly fee * root EBS quantity dimension * job runtime in hours
- Amazon EMR value = variety of cases * r5d.4xlarge Amazon EMR value * job runtime in hours
- 4xlarge Amazon EMR value = $0.27 per hour
- Complete value = Amazon EC2 value + root Amazon EBS value + Amazon EMR value
The calculations reveal that the Amazon EMR 7.12 benchmark yields a 3.6x value effectivity enchancment over open supply Spark 3.5.6 and Iceberg 1.10.0 in working the benchmark job.
| Metric | Amazon EMR 7.12 | Amazon EMR 7.5 | Open supply Apache Spark 3.5.6 and Apache Iceberg 1.10.0 |
| Runtime in seconds | 1349.62 | 1535.62 | 6113.92 |
Variety of EC2 cases (Consists of main node) | 9 | 9 | 9 |
| Amazon EBS Measurement | 20gb | 20gb | 20gb |
Amazon EC2 (Complete runtime value) | $3.89 | $4.42 | $17.61 |
| Amazon EBS value | $0.01 | $0.01 | $0.04 |
| Amazon EMR value | $0.91 | $1.04 | $0 |
| Complete value | $4.81 | $5.47 | $17.65 |
| Value financial savings | Amazon EMR 7.12 is 3.6x higher | Amazon EMR 7.5 is 3.2x higher | Baseline |
Along with the time-based metrics mentioned to date, knowledge from Spark occasion logs present that Amazon EMR scanned roughly 4.3x much less knowledge from Amazon S3 and 5.3x fewer data than the open supply model within the TPC-DS 3 TB benchmark. This discount in Amazon S3 knowledge scanning contributes on to value financial savings for Amazon EMR workloads.
Run open supply Apache Spark benchmarks on Apache Iceberg tables
We used separate EC2 clusters, every geared up with 9 r5d.4xlarge cases, for testing each open supply Spark 3.5.6 and Amazon EMR 7.12 for Iceberg workload. The first node was geared up with 16 vCPU and 128 GB of reminiscence, and the 8 employee nodes collectively had 128 vCPU and 1024 GB of reminiscence. We performed exams utilizing the Amazon EMR default settings to showcase the everyday person expertise and minimally adjusted the settings of Spark and Iceberg to take care of a balanced comparability.
The next desk summarizes the Amazon EC2 configurations for the first node and eight employee nodes of sort r5d.4xlarge.
| EC2 Occasion | vCPU | Reminiscence (GiB) | Occasion storage (GB) | EBS root quantity (GB) |
| r5d.4xlarge | 16 | 128 | 2 x 300 NVMe SSD | 20 GB |
Stipulations
The next conditions are required to run the benchmarking:
- Utilizing the directions within the emr-spark-benchmark GitHub repository, arrange the TPC-DS supply knowledge in your S3 bucket and in your native pc.
- Construct the benchmark utility following the steps supplied in Steps to construct spark-benchmark-assembly utility and replica the benchmark utility to your S3 bucket. Alternatively, copy spark-benchmark-assembly-3.5.6.jar to your S3 bucket.
- Create Iceberg tables from the TPC-DS supply knowledge. Comply with the directions on GitHub to create Iceberg tables utilizing the Hadoop catalog. For instance, the next code makes use of an Amazon EMR 7.12 cluster with Iceberg enabled to create the tables:
Observe: The Hadoop catalog warehouse location and database title from the previous step. We use the identical Iceberg tables to run benchmarks with Amazon EMR 7.12 and open supply Spark.
This benchmark utility is constructed from the department tpcds-v2.13_iceberg. When you’re constructing a brand new benchmark utility, swap to the right department after downloading the supply code from the GitHub repository.
Create and configure a YARN cluster on Amazon EC2
To check Iceberg efficiency between Amazon EMR on Amazon EC2 and open supply Spark on Amazon EC2, observe the directions within the emr-spark-benchmark GitHub repository to create an open supply Spark cluster on Amazon EC2 utilizing Flintrock with 8 employee nodes.
Based mostly on the cluster choice for this take a look at, the next configurations are used:
Be certain to switch the placeholder <non-public ip of main node>, within the yarn-site.xml file, with the first node’s IP handle of your Flintrock cluster.
Run the TPC-DS benchmark with Apache Spark 3.5.6 and Apache Iceberg 1.10.0
Full the next steps to run the TPC-DS benchmark:
- Log in to the open supply cluster main node utilizing
flintrock login $CLUSTER_NAME. - Submit your Spark job:
- Select the right Iceberg catalog warehouse location and database that has the created Iceberg tables.
- The outcomes are created in
s3://<YOUR_S3_BUCKET>/benchmark_run. - You’ll be able to observe progress in
/media/ephemeral0/spark_run.log.
Summarize the outcomes
After the Spark job finishes, retrieve the take a look at consequence file from the output S3 bucket at s3://<YOUR_S3_BUCKET>/benchmark_run/timestamp=xxxx/abstract.csv/xxx.csv. This may be finished both by the Amazon S3 console by navigating to the desired bucket location or through the use of the Amazon Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). The Spark benchmark utility organizes the info by making a timestamp folder and inserting a abstract file inside a folder labeled abstract.csv. The output CSV recordsdata include 4 columns with out headers:
- Question title
- Median time
- Minimal time
- Most time
With the info from 3 separate take a look at runs with 1 iteration every time, we will calculate the typical and geometric imply of the benchmark runtimes.
Run the TPC-DS benchmark with Amazon EMR runtime for Apache Spark
Many of the directions are much like Steps to run Spark Benchmarking with a number of Iceberg-specific particulars.
Stipulations
Full the next prerequisite steps:
- Run
aws configureto configure the AWS CLI shell to level to the benchmarking AWS account. Consult with Configure the AWS CLI for directions. - Add the benchmark utility JAR file to Amazon S3.
Deploy Amazon EMR cluster and run the benchmark job
Full the next steps to run the benchmark job:
- Use the AWS CLI command as proven in Deploy EMR on EC2 Cluster and run benchmark job to deploy an Amazon EMR on EC2 cluster. Be certain to allow Iceberg. See Create an Iceberg cluster for extra particulars. Select the right Amazon EMR model, root quantity dimension, and similar useful resource configuration because the open supply Flintrock setup. Consult with create-cluster for an in depth description of the AWS CLI choices.
- Retailer the cluster ID from the response. We’d like this for the subsequent step.
- Submit the benchmark job in Amazon EMR utilizing
add-stepsfrom the AWS CLI:- Substitute
<cluster ID>with the cluster ID from Step 2. - The benchmark utility is at
s3://<your-bucket>/spark-benchmark-assembly-3.5.6.jar. - Select the right Iceberg catalog warehouse location and database that has the created Iceberg tables. This must be the identical because the one used for the open supply TPC-DS benchmark run.
- The outcomes shall be in
s3://<your-bucket>/benchmark_run.
- Substitute
Summarize the outcomes
After the step is full, you’ll be able to see the summarized benchmark consequence at s3://<YOUR_S3_BUCKET>/benchmark_run/timestamp=xxxx/abstract.csv/xxx.csv in the identical method because the earlier run and compute the typical and geometric imply of the question runtimes.
Clear up
To assist stop future expenses, delete the sources you created by following the directions supplied within the Cleanup part of the GitHub repository.
Abstract
Amazon EMR optimizes the runtime for Spark when used with Iceberg tables, attaining 4.5x quicker efficiency than open supply Apache Spark 3.5.6 and Apache Iceberg 1.10.0 with Amazon EMR 7.12 on TPC-DS 3 TB, v2.13. This represents a major development from Amazon EMR 7.5, which delivered 3.6x quicker efficiency and closes the hole to parquet efficiency on Amazon EMR so clients can use the advantages of Iceberg with no efficiency penalty.
We encourage you to maintain updated with the newest Amazon EMR releases to completely profit from ongoing efficiency enhancements.
To remain knowledgeable, subscribe to the RSS feed for the AWS Massive Knowledge Weblog, the place you will discover updates on the Amazon EMR runtime for Spark and Iceberg, in addition to recommendations on configuration finest practices and tuning suggestions.
Concerning the authors
Atul Felix Payapilly is a software program improvement engineer for Amazon EMR at Amazon Net Providers.
Akshaya KP is a software program improvement engineer for Amazon EMR at Amazon Net Providers.
Hari Kishore Chaparala is a software program improvement engineer for Amazon EMR at Amazon Net Providers.
Giovanni Matteo is the Senior Supervisor for the Amazon EMR Spark and Iceberg group.
