c7a.medium

Analysis

The c7a.medium is a compute optimized instance in the c7a series with 1 vCPU and 2 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.medium on AWS Graviton3 costs $0.0363/hour, 29% less ($10.96 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the c7gd.medium at $0.0454 and the c7gn.medium at $0.0624.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $9.69 a month per instance: $0.0513/hour against $0.0646/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 $0.0513/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $37.46 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).

Looking beyond its own line, 9 of 15 current types with 1 vCPU and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the t2.small on Intel Xeon Family at $0.0230/hour. It is burstable, so it only suits workloads that do not run the CPU flat out.