The i7i.metal-48xl pairs 192 vCPU with 1536 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, "7" is the generation, "i" marks Intel processors and "metal-48xl" is the size within the i7i family. It runs on Intel Xeon Scalable (Emerald Rapids) at 3.2 GHz, and AWS introduced it in April 2025. AWS has since shipped i8g; i8g.metal-48xl is the direct replacement at this size. Spot's node ladder tops out below this size, so i7i.metal-48xl becomes 12 × mh.vs1.2xlarge (192 vCPU, 1536 GiB combined), $18.12/hr on AWS in US East (N. Virginia), from $0.252/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.
| Region | AWS on-demand | AWS Spot | 1-yr Reserved | 3-yr Reserved | Rackspace Spot | You save |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US East, N. Virginia | $18.121 | $4.799 | $0.252 | $17.869 savings | ||
| US Central, Chicago | no AWS region | $0.252 | ||||
| US Central, Dallas | no AWS region | $1.572 | ||||
| Hong Kong | $23.929 | $0.252 | $23.677 savings | |||
| Sydney, Australia | $21.722 | $2.172 | $0.252 | $21.470 savings | ||
| London, UK | $21.025 | $2.103 | $1.572 | $19.453 savings | ||
| US West, San Jose | $19.980 | $1.998 | $0.024 | $19.956 savings | ||
| US Central, Dallas 2 | no AWS region | $2.904 |