Amazon EMR on EKS now supports interactive Apache Spark sessions with Spark Connect. Data engineers and data scientists can develop and debug Apache Spark applications interactively from managed notebooks in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio and their own IDEs, such as Jupyter and Visual Studio Code, with Spark running on the Amazon EKS clusters they already operate. An interactive session provides a persistent Spark context that spans across cells and scripts, letting you blend local Python code execution with remote Spark operations.