The i3.8xlarge is a storage-optimized AWS EC2 instance: 32 vCPU and 244 GiB of memory, 7.63 GiB per vCPU. In the name, "i" is I/O, meaning local storage, "3" is the generation and "8xlarge" is the size within the i3 family. It runs on Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) at 2.3 GHz, and AWS introduced it in November 2016. AWS has since shipped i4i, i7i and i8g; i4i.8xlarge is the direct replacement at this size, scoring 552,605 CoreMark/s against this instance's 425,306 — roughly 30% more throughput for the same vCPU count. No single Spot node covers 32 vCPU and 244 GiB, so the equivalent is a fleet: 2 × mh.vs1.2xlarge, 32 vCPU and 256 GiB in total, $2.50/hr on AWS in US East (N. Virginia), from $0.042/hr on Rackspace Spot. Spot delivers compute as managed Kubernetes, so a node pool of that size is the native shape of the answer rather than a workaround — provided the workload scales horizontally.
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i3.8xlarge gives you 32 vCPU and 244 GiB in a single machine. The largest comparable Spot node, mh.vs1.2xlarge, is 16 vCPU and 128 GiB, so the equivalent here is 2 nodes rather than one.
Spot runs as managed Kubernetes, so a 2-node pool is the normal way to run things rather than a workaround. If your workload already sits behind a load balancer, a queue or a scheduler, it spreads across them without changes. If it needs all 32 cores and 244 GiB in one process, it does not.
No local diski3.8xlarge comes with 4 × 1,900 GB NVMe SSD attached to the machine. Spot nodes use network storage only, so that disk doesn't come with it. If you were using it as fast scratch space, you'd move to a persistent volume or object storage, which are slower to read.
