m5ad.xlarge is AWS's general-purpose EC2 size at 4 vCPU and 16 GiB. In the name, "m" is the general-purpose line, "5" is the generation, "ad" marks AMD processors and local NVMe storage and "xlarge" is the size within the m5ad family. It runs on AMD EPYC 7571 at 2.5 GHz, and AWS introduced it in March 2019. AWS has since shipped m6i, m7i, m8i and m9g; m6i.xlarge is the direct replacement at this size, scoring 66,742 CoreMark/s against this instance's 52,335 — roughly 28% more throughput for the same vCPU count. On Rackspace Spot the same shape is gp.vs1.large — 4 vCPU, 16 GiB, matched on both dimensions, about 95% below the US East (N. Virginia) on-demand rate.
Match qualityNo local disk
m5ad.xlarge comes with 1 × 150 GB NVMe SSD attached to the machine. Rackspace Spot nodes use network storage only, so that disk does not come with it.
If you were using the local disk as fast scratch space — temporary files, a local cache, an index — you will need a persistent volume or object storage instead, and both are slower to read. If it was just extra space you never depended on, nothing changes.
