The m6i.metal pairs 128 vCPU with 512 GiB of RAM, the 4.00 GiB-per-vCPU ratio that marks a general-purpose instance. In the name, "m" is the general-purpose line, "6" is the generation, "i" marks Intel processors and "metal" is the size within the m6i family. It runs on Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) at 3.5 GHz, and AWS introduced it in November 2021. AWS has since shipped m7i, m8i and m9g; m7g.metal is the direct replacement at this size. Spot's node ladder tops out below this size, so m6i.metal becomes 8 × gp.vs2.2xlarge (128 vCPU, 512 GiB combined), 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.
| Region | AWS on-demand | AWS Spot | 1-yr Reserved | 3-yr Reserved | Rackspace Spot | You save |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US East, N. Virginia | $6.144 | $1.284 | $4.064 | $2.787 | $0.328 | $5.816 savings |
| US Central, Chicago | no AWS region | $0.328 | ||||
| US Central, Dallas | no AWS region | $0.408 | ||||
| Hong Kong | $8.448 | $5.588 | $3.832 | $0.088 | $8.360 savings | |
| Sydney, Australia | $7.680 | $3.262 | $5.080 | $3.484 | $1.288 | $6.392 savings |
| London, UK | $7.104 | $0.950 | $4.692 | $3.230 | $1.768 | $5.336 savings |
| US West, San Jose | $7.168 | $0.794 | $4.728 | $3.266 | $1.208 | $5.960 savings |
| US Central, Dallas 2 | no AWS region | $0.008 | ||||
| US East, N. Virginia 2 | $6.144 | $1.284 | $4.064 | $2.787 | $1.208 | $4.936 savings |