c4.large

Analysis

The c4.large is a compute optimized instance in the c4 series with 2 vCPUs and 3.75 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (Haswell) (up to 2.9 GHz), which makes it compute-heavy at 1.88 GiB of memory per vCPU.

The newer c5.large on Intel Xeon Platinum 8124M is 15% cheaper at $0.0850/hour, which makes the c4.large hard to justify for new deployments.

It is the smallest of the 5 c4 sizes. Stepping up to the c4.xlarge gives 4 vCPUs and 7.5 GiB for $72.27 more a month. Unit price is not flat across the series ($0.0442 to $0.0500 per vCPU-hour), so the size changes the rate you pay.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $40.15 a month per instance: $0.1000/hour against $0.1550/hour, a 55% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.0630/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.0440/hour, 56% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $0.1920/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

Looking beyond its own line, 23 of 36 current types with 2 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the t4g.medium on AWS Graviton2 at $0.0336/hour. It is burstable, so it only suits workloads that do not run the CPU flat out.