The i4i.16xlarge pairs 64 vCPU with 512 GiB of RAM, the 8.00 GiB-per-vCPU ratio that marks a storage-optimized instance. In the name, "i" is I/O, meaning local storage, "4" is the generation, "i" marks Intel processors and "16xlarge" is the size within the i4i family. It runs on Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) at 3.5 GHz, and AWS introduced it in April 2022. AWS has since shipped i7i and i8g; i7i.16xlarge is the direct replacement at this size, scoring 1,403,971 CoreMark/s against this instance's 1,102,498 — roughly 27% more throughput for the same vCPU count. Spot's node ladder tops out below this size, so i4i.16xlarge becomes 4 × mh.vs1.2xlarge (64 vCPU, 512 GiB combined), $5.49/hr on AWS in US East (N. Virginia), from $0.084/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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i4i.16xlarge gives you 64 vCPU and 512 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 512 GiB in one process, it does not.
No local diski4i.16xlarge comes with 4 × 3,750 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.
