The i4i.24xlarge is a storage-optimized AWS EC2 instance: 96 vCPU and 768 GiB of memory, 8.00 GiB per vCPU. In the name, "i" is I/O, meaning local storage, "4" is the generation, "i" marks Intel processors and "24xlarge" is the size within the i4i family. It runs on Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) at 3.5 GHz, and AWS introduced it in October 2023. AWS has since shipped i7i and i8g; i7i.24xlarge is the direct replacement at this size, scoring 2,061,413 CoreMark/s against this instance's 1,713,980 — roughly 20% more throughput for the same vCPU count. No single Spot node covers 96 vCPU and 768 GiB, so the equivalent is a fleet: 6 × mh.vs1.2xlarge, 96 vCPU and 768 GiB in total, $8.24/hr on AWS in US East (N. Virginia), from $0.126/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.24xlarge gives you 96 vCPU and 768 GiB in a single machine. The largest comparable Spot node, mh.vs1.2xlarge, is 16 vCPU and 128 GiB, so the equivalent here is 6 nodes rather than one.
Spot runs as managed Kubernetes, so a 6-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 96 cores and 768 GiB in one process, it does not.
No local diski4i.24xlarge comes with 6 × 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.
