The m7a.8xlarge pairs 32 vCPU with 128 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, "7" is the generation, "a" marks AMD processors and "8xlarge" is the size within the m7a family. It runs on AMD EPYC 9R14 Processor at Up to 3.7 GHz, and AWS introduced it in August 2023. AWS has since shipped m8a and m9g; m8a.8xlarge is the direct replacement at this size, scoring 1,391,103 CoreMark/s against this instance's 1,087,080 — roughly 28% more throughput for the same vCPU count. Spot's node ladder tops out below this size, so m7a.8xlarge becomes 2 × gp.vs2.2xlarge (32 vCPU, 128 GiB combined), $1.85/hr on AWS in US East (N. Virginia), from $0.082/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 | $1.855 | $0.776 | $1.227 | $0.841 | $0.082 | $1.773 savings |
| US Central, Chicago | no AWS region | $0.082 | ||||
| US Central, Dallas | no AWS region | $0.102 | ||||
| Hong Kong | $0.022 | |||||
| Sydney, Australia | $2.318 | $0.982 | $1.534 | $1.052 | $0.322 | $1.996 savings |
| London, UK | $2.144 | $0.648 | $1.416 | $0.975 | $0.442 | $1.702 savings |
| US West, San Jose | $0.302 | |||||
| US Central, Dallas 2 | no AWS region | $0.002 | ||||
| US East, N. Virginia 2 | $1.855 | $0.776 | $1.227 | $0.841 | $0.302 | $1.553 savings |