c5.4xlarge

Analysis

The c5.4xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c5 series with 16 vCPUs and 32 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 c4.4xlarge 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.4xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R32 costs $0.6160/hour, 9.4% less ($46.72 a month). The other variants are the c5ad.4xlarge at $0.6880, the c5d.4xlarge at $0.7680 and the c5n.4xlarge at $0.8640.

At $0.6800/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $496 a month, the c5.4xlarge 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 $269 a month per instance: $0.6800/hour against $1.05/hour, a 54% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.4280/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.2850/hour, 58% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $1.42/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.