The r5.24xlarge is a memory-optimized AWS EC2 instance: 96 vCPU and 768 GiB of memory, 8.00 GiB per vCPU. In the name, "r" stands for RAM, "5" is the generation and "24xlarge" is the size within the r5 family. It runs on Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 at 3.1 GHz, and AWS introduced it in July 2018. AWS has since shipped r6i, r7i, r8i and r9g; r6i.24xlarge is the direct replacement at this size, scoring 1,705,908 CoreMark/s against this instance's 1,351,399 — roughly 26% more throughput for the same vCPU count. No single Spot node covers 96 vCPU and 768 GiB, so the equivalent is a fleet: 6 × mh.vs1.2xlarge, 96 vCPU and 768 GiB in total, $6.05/hr on AWS in US East (N. Virginia), from $0.126/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.
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r5.24xlarge gives you 96 vCPU and 768 GiB in a single machine. The largest comparable Spot node, mh.vs1.2xlarge, is 16 vCPU and 128 GiB, so the equivalent here is 6 nodes rather than one.
Spot runs as managed Kubernetes, so a 6-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 96 cores and 768 GiB in one process, it does not.
