The c3.xlarge is a compute-optimized AWS EC2 instance: 4 vCPU and 7.5 GiB of memory, 1.88 GiB per vCPU. In the name, "c" stands for compute, "3" is the generation and "xlarge" 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.xlarge is the direct replacement at this size, scoring 67,359 CoreMark/s against this instance's 58,594 — roughly 15% more throughput for the same vCPU count. Rackspace Spot's ch.vs1.large is a like-for-like substitute at 4 vCPU and 8 GiB, about 90% below the US East (N. Virginia) on-demand rate.
Match qualityNo local disk
c3.xlarge comes with 2 × 40 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.
