The r8a.metal-24xl pairs 96 vCPU with 768 GiB of RAM, the 8.00 GiB-per-vCPU ratio that marks a memory-optimized instance. In the name, "r" stands for RAM, "8" is the generation, "a" marks AMD processors and "metal-24xl" is the size within the r8a family. It runs on AMD EPYC 9R45 Processor at Up to 4.5 GHz, and AWS introduced it in November 2025. AWS has since shipped r9g. Spot's node ladder tops out below this size, so r8a.metal-24xl becomes 6 × mh.vs1.2xlarge (96 vCPU, 768 GiB combined), $7.67/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.
| Region | AWS on-demand | AWS Spot | 1-yr Reserved | 3-yr Reserved | Rackspace Spot | You save |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US East, N. Virginia | $7.668 | $1.304 | $0.126 | $7.542 savings | ||
| US Central, Chicago | no AWS region | $0.126 | ||||
| US Central, Dallas | no AWS region | $0.786 | ||||
| Hong Kong | $0.126 | |||||
| Sydney, Australia | $0.126 | |||||
| London, UK | $0.786 | |||||
| US West, San Jose | $0.012 | |||||
| US Central, Dallas 2 | no AWS region | $1.452 |