c5.xlarge

Analysis

The c5.xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c5 series with 4 vCPUs and 8 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.xlarge 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.xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R32 costs $0.1540/hour, 9.4% less ($11.68 a month). The other variants are the c5ad.xlarge at $0.1720, the c5d.xlarge at $0.1920 and the c5n.xlarge at $0.2160.

At $0.1700/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $124 a month, the c5.xlarge 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 $67.16 a month per instance: $0.1700/hour against $0.2620/hour, a 54% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.1070/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.0710/hour, 58% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $0.3540/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.