I know this question has been asked before but those answers seem to revolve around Hadoop.  For Spark you don't really need all the extra Hadoop cruft.  With the spark-ec2 script (available via GitHub for 2.0) your environment is prepared for Spark.  Are there any compelling use cases (other than a far superior boto3 sdk interface) for running with EMR over EC2?
This question boils down to the value of managed services, IMHO.
Running Spark as a standalone in local mode only requires you get the latest Spark, untar it, cd to its bin path and then running spark-submit, etc
However, creating a multi-node cluster that runs in cluster mode requires that you actually do real networking, configuring, tuning, etc. This means you've got to deal with IAM roles, Security groups, and there are subnet considerations within your VPC.
When you use EMR, you get a turnkey cluster in which you can 1-click install many popular applications (spark included), and all of the Security Groups are already configured properly for network communication between nodes, you've got logging already setup and pointing at S3, you've got easy SSH instructions, you've got an already-installed apparatus for tunneling and viewing the various UI's, you've got visual usage metrics at the IO level, node level, and job submission level, you also have the ability to create and run Steps -- which are jobs that can be run in the command line of the drive node or as Spark applications that leverage the whole cluster. Then, on top of that, you can export that whole cluster, steps included, and copy paste the CLI script into a recurring job via DataPipeline and literally create an ETL pipeline in 60 seconds flat.
You wouldn't get any of that if you built it yourself in EC2. I know which one I would choose... EMR. But that's just me.
Does EMR still have any advantages over EC2 for Spark?