[virgilp]

I find the EMR markup to be substantial; if I weren't working in a corporation, I would stand up my own spark clusters, e.g. using spark-ec2

[SmirkingRevenge]

It is, but you can run the bare minimum number of core nodes (3 I think?) and use spot instances for any others.

At a previous job, we just built our own ec2 image that ran spark in standalone mode for ephemeral spark clusters, and it was wonderful and cheap. And the clusters launched very fast compared to EMR.