Instances›AWS EC2›mac2›mac2.metal
Compute
vCPUs8
Memory16 GiB
Mem / vCPU2.00 GiB
ProcessorApple M1 chip with 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine
Clock speed3.2 GHz
Architecturearm64_mac
Storage
TypeEBS only
Bandwidth10,000 Mbps
Throughput1250 MB/s
IOPS55,000
Networking
Performance10 Gigabit
Max ENIs8
IPv6Yes
GPUNone
Family sizes
mac2.metal8 vCPU · 16 GiB
mac2.metal

The mac2.metal is a general-purpose AWS EC2 instance: 8 vCPU and 16 GiB of memory, 2.00 GiB per vCPU. In the name, "mac" is macOS on Apple hardware, "2" is the generation and "metal" is the size within the mac2 family. It runs on Apple M1 chip with 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine at 3.2 GHz, and AWS introduced it in July 2022. mac2 is the current generation of the mac family, so there is no newer AWS size to migrate to. Rackspace Spot has no equivalent to offer: macOS licensing ties these instances to Apple hardware, which Rackspace Spot does not operate. Spot's largest VM tops out at 16 vCPU and 128 GiB, and even that is not the missing piece here. The table below prices what AWS charges; the honest answer on the Spot side is that this workload stays where it is.

Match qualityNo equivalent

mac2.metal runs macOS on Apple hardware, which is the entire point of it. Apple only licenses macOS to run on Apple machines, so no cloud provider can offer it as a VM on their own servers. Rackspace Spot has no macOS product and will not have one.

Rackspace Spot sells x86_64 Kubernetes nodes up to 16 vCPU, plus one NVIDIA A30 GPU class. If this is running an Xcode or iOS build pipeline, the macOS steps have to stay where they are — but the Linux parts (dependency caching, container builds, test matrices, publishing artifacts) can move, and on most iOS pipelines that is the larger share of the bill.

Pricing by region
1 hr
RegionAWS on-demandAWS Spot1-yr Reserved3-yr ReservedRackspace SpotYou save
US East, N. Virginia
US Central, Chicagono AWS region
US Central, Dallasno AWS region
Hong Kong
Sydney, Australia
London, UK
US West, San Jose
US Central, Dallas 2no AWS region
US East, N. Virginia 2
When to use it
Good for
  • ●Backend services with no single dominant resource
  • ●Queue workers and scheduled jobs
  • ●Web and application servers with mixed CPU and memory demand
  • ●Workloads that fit inside 16 GiB of RAM
  • ●Parallel work that can occupy 8 vCPU
  • ●Network-heavy services — AWS rates this size at 10 Gigabit
Avoid if
  • ●The working set needs more than 16 GiB of RAM
  • ●You cannot rebuild x86-only binaries or vendor images for aarch64
  • ●You need dedicated hardware. Rackspace Spot sells virtualised compute only.
  • ●Sustained full-core CPU load. A compute-optimized family costs less per unit of work.
  • ●More than 2.00 GiB of RAM per vCPU is needed — that ratio is fixed for the whole family
  • ●Local NVMe or instance-store disk is a hard requirement
Rackspace Spot sells spare capacity at market prices. You pay what the market decides, not a list price.
  • Spot sells spare capacity at market prices. It is the cheapest compute on the internet.
  • Prices are set by supply and demand. You pay what the market decides.
  • Compute is delivered as fully managed Kubernetes. All infrastructure is taken care of.
  • Egress costs $0.01/GB after the free allowance. AWS charges $0.09/GB.
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