c3.4xlarge is AWS's compute-optimized EC2 size at 16 vCPU and 30 GiB. In the name, "c" stands for compute, "3" is the generation and "4xlarge" is the size within the c3 family. It runs on Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2 (Ivy Bridge) at 2.8 GHz, and AWS introduced it in November 2013. AWS has since shipped c4, c5, c6i and c7i; c4.4xlarge is the direct replacement at this size, scoring 268,007 CoreMark/s against this instance's 237,989 — roughly 13% more throughput for the same vCPU count. On Rackspace Spot the same shape is ch.vs1.2xlarge — 16 vCPU, 32 GiB, matched on both dimensions, about 95% below the US East (N. Virginia) on-demand rate.
Match qualityNo local disk
c3.4xlarge comes with 2 × 160 GB SSD attached to the machine. Rackspace Spot nodes use network storage only, so that disk does not come with it.
If you were using the local disk as fast scratch space — temporary files, a local cache, an index — you will need a persistent volume or object storage instead, and both are slower to read. If it was just extra space you never depended on, nothing changes.
