The m5d.8xlarge is a general-purpose AWS EC2 instance: 32 vCPU and 128 GiB of memory, 4.00 GiB per vCPU. In the name, "m" is the general-purpose line, "5" is the generation, "d" marks local NVMe storage and "8xlarge" is the size within the m5d family. It runs on Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 at 3.1 GHz, and AWS introduced it in June 2019. AWS has since shipped m6i, m7i, m8i and m9g; m6i.8xlarge is the direct replacement at this size, scoring 550,372 CoreMark/s against this instance's 462,941 — roughly 19% more throughput for the same vCPU count. No single Spot node covers 32 vCPU and 128 GiB, so the equivalent is a fleet: 2 × gp.vs1.2xlarge, 32 vCPU and 128 GiB in total, about 95% below the US East (N. Virginia) on-demand rate. 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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m5d.8xlarge gives you 32 vCPU and 128 GiB in a single machine. The largest comparable Spot node, gp.vs1.2xlarge, is 16 vCPU and 64 GiB, so the equivalent here is 2 nodes rather than one.
Spot runs as managed Kubernetes, so a 2-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 32 cores and 128 GiB in one process, it does not.
No local diskm5d.8xlarge comes with 2 × 600 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.
