c5.2xlarge

Analysis

The c5.2xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c5 series with 8 vCPUs and 16 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Platinum 8124M (up to 3.4 GHz), which makes it compute-heavy at 2 GiB of memory per vCPU.

It is 15% cheaper than the older c4.2xlarge on Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (Haswell), so staying on the previous generation costs more as well as being slower.

Within the same generation and size, the c5a.2xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R32 costs $0.3080/hour, 9.4% less ($23.36 a month). The other variants are the c5ad.2xlarge at $0.3440, the c5d.2xlarge at $0.3840 and the c5n.2xlarge at $0.4320.

At $0.3400/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $248 a month, the c5.2xlarge 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 $134 a month per instance: $0.3400/hour against $0.5240/hour, a 54% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.2140/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.1420/hour, 58% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $0.7080/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.