c5d.12xlarge

Analysis

The c5d.12xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c5d series with 48 vCPUs and 96 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.12xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R32 costs $1.85/hour, 20% less ($333 a month). The other variants are the c5.12xlarge at $2.04 and the c5ad.12xlarge at $2.06.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $929 a month per instance: $2.30/hour against $3.58/hour, a 55% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $1.45/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.9670/hour, 58% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $4.51/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

It has local instance storage (2 x 900 GB NVMe SSD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: 12 Gigabit.

Looking beyond its own line, 16 of 30 current types with 48 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the c6g.12xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $1.63/hour.

On demand it costs $2.30/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $1,682 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for compute optimized types at the 49th percentile per vCPU ($0.0480 per vCPU-hour) and the 53rd percentile per GiB ($0.0240 per GiB-hour).