c7a.4xlarge

Analysis

The c7a.4xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c7a series with 16 vCPUs and 32 GiB of memory on AMD EPYC 9R14 (up to Up to 3.7 GHz), which makes it compute-heavy at 2 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the c7g.4xlarge on AWS Graviton3 costs $0.5800/hour, 29% less ($176 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the c7i-flex.4xlarge at $0.6783, the c7i.4xlarge at $0.7140 and the c7gd.4xlarge at $0.7258.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 34% more than the c6a.4xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R13 ($153 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer c8a.4xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R45 is 5.0% dearer at $0.8622/hour.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $155 a month per instance: $0.8211/hour against $1.03/hour, a 26% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, São Paulo, Mumbai and Sydney, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

On demand it costs $0.8211/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $599 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for compute optimized types at the 61st percentile per vCPU ($0.0513 per vCPU-hour) and the 63rd percentile per GiB ($0.0257 per GiB-hour).