c5.24xlarge

Analysis

The c5.24xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c5 series with 96 vCPUs and 192 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Platinum 8275L (up to 3.4 GHz), which makes it compute-heavy at 2 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the c5a.24xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R32 costs $3.70/hour, 9.4% less ($280 a month). The other variants are the c5ad.24xlarge at $4.13 and the c5d.24xlarge at $4.61.

At $4.08/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $2,978 a month, the c5.24xlarge is one of the cheaper ways to buy compute optimized capacity: only 24% of the 291 current compute optimized types cost less per vCPU-hour than its $0.0425.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $1,612 a month per instance: $4.08/hour against $6.29/hour, a 54% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $2.57/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $1.71/hour, 58% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $8.50/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

Looking beyond its own line, 3 of 22 current types with 96 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the c6a.24xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R13 at $3.67/hour.