The i3p.16xlarge pairs 64 vCPU with 488 GiB of RAM, the 7.63 GiB-per-vCPU ratio that marks a storage-optimized instance. In the name, "i" is I/O, meaning local storage, "3" is the generation and "16xlarge" is the size within the i3p family. It runs on Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) at 2.3 GHz, and AWS introduced it in December 2017. AWS has since shipped i4i, i7i and i8g; i4i.16xlarge is the direct replacement at this size. Spot's node ladder tops out below this size, so i3p.16xlarge becomes 4 × mh.vs1.2xlarge (64 vCPU, 512 GiB combined). 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.
Match qualityScale-out match
i3p.16xlarge gives you 64 vCPU and 488 GiB in a single machine. The largest comparable Spot node, mh.vs1.2xlarge, is 16 vCPU and 128 GiB, so the equivalent here is 4 nodes rather than one.
Spot runs as managed Kubernetes, so a 4-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 64 cores and 488 GiB in one process, it does not.
Pricing by region
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Region
AWS on-demand
AWS Spot
1-yr Reserved
3-yr Reserved
Rackspace Spot
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US East, N. Virginia
$0.084
US Central, Chicago
no AWS region
$0.084
US Central, Dallas
no AWS region
$0.524
Hong Kong
$0.084
Sydney, Australia
$0.084
London, UK
$0.524
US West, San Jose
$0.008
US Central, Dallas 2
no AWS region
$0.968
When to use it
Good for
●Streaming ingest that spools to local disk
●Elasticsearch and OpenSearch data nodes
●NoSQL stores such as Cassandra, ScyllaDB and MongoDB
●Workloads that fit inside 488 GiB of RAM
●Parallel work that can occupy 64 vCPU
●Network-heavy services — AWS rates this size at 20 Gigabit
●Anything that shards cleanly across 4 nodes, which is how it maps onto Rackspace Spot
Avoid if
●Starting a new deployment. i4i.16xlarge is the newer generation at this size.
●The working set needs more than 488 GiB of RAM
●More than 7.63 GiB of RAM per vCPU is needed — that ratio is fixed for the whole family
●The work is single-threaded. Most of these 64 vCPU would sit idle.
●Local NVMe or instance-store disk is a hard requirement
●GPU or FPGA acceleration is needed
Rackspace Spot sells spare capacity at market prices. You pay what the market decides, not a list price.
Spot sells spare capacity at market prices. It is the cheapest compute on the internet.
Prices are set by supply and demand. You pay what the market decides.
Compute is delivered as fully managed Kubernetes. All infrastructure is taken care of.
Egress costs $0.01/GB after the free allowance. AWS charges $0.09/GB.
