i3.largeAWS Pricing, Specs & Benchmarks

The i3 family is a generation-3 storage-optimized (NVMe SSD) line running on Intel Xeon (x86_64). i3.large provides 2 vCPUs and 15.3GB of RAM (a 1:8 vCPU-to-memory ratio), priced at $0.1560/hr On-Demand — about $112.32 per month at 24×7 utilization. In Sysbench CPU benchmarks it scores 2301 single-core and 2742 multi-core.

Storage-optimized (NVMe SSD) instances are sized for NoSQL databases (Cassandra, ScyllaDB), search engines (Elasticsearch), transactional databases needing very low storage latency, and large log-ingestion pipelines. If your workload doesn't match that profile — for example, if you're running a memory-bound app on a compute-optimized instance, or a CPU-pegged batch job on a burstable t-series — you'll likely pay for capacity you can't use or run into bottlenecks you didn't anticipate. The pages for sibling families (linked further down) cover those alternatives in detail.

In the AWS instance-naming convention, the digit after the series letter is the generation — higher is newer. AWS's current-generation alternative in the same series is **i4i**, which generally offers better price/performance on newer silicon; if you're spinning up a new workload it's usually worth comparing the two before committing.

Pricing varies by region (sometimes meaningfully — the gap between the cheapest and most expensive AWS region for the same SKU is often 15–30%). The regional pricing table further down shows where i3.large is cheapest today, both On-Demand and Spot. Spot pricing for i3.large is currently $0.0416/hr — roughly 73% off On-Demand — which makes the instance viable for fault-tolerant batch jobs, CI fleets, and any workload that can tolerate interruption with short notice.