The r4.large is a memory-optimized AWS EC2 instance: 2 vCPU and 15.25 GiB of memory, 7.63 GiB per vCPU. In the name, "r" stands for RAM, "4" is the generation and "large" is the size within the r4 family. It runs on Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) at 2.3 GHz, and AWS introduced it in November 2016. AWS has since shipped r5, r6i, r7i and r8i; r5.large is the direct replacement at this size, scoring 29,156 CoreMark/s against this instance's 26,099 — roughly 12% more throughput for the same vCPU count. Rackspace Spot's mh.vs1.medium is a like-for-like substitute at 2 vCPU and 16 GiB, about 92% below the US East (N. Virginia) on-demand rate.