c7i.large

Analysis

The c7i.large is a compute optimized instance in the c7i series with 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) (up to 3.2 GHz), which makes it compute-heavy at 2 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the c7g.large on AWS Graviton3 costs $0.0725/hour, 19% less ($12.23 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the c7i-flex.large at $0.0848, the c7gd.large at $0.0907 and the c7a.large at $0.1026.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $35.26 a month per instance: $0.0892/hour against $0.1376/hour, a 54% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.0590/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 66% of the time; three years brings it to $0.0393/hour, 56% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $0.1812/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

On demand it costs $0.0892/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $65.15 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for compute optimized types at the 40th percentile per vCPU ($0.0446 per vCPU-hour) and the 44th percentile per GiB ($0.0223 per GiB-hour).

Looking beyond its own line, 18 of 36 current types with 2 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the t4g.medium on AWS Graviton2 at $0.0336/hour. It is burstable, so it only suits workloads that do not run the CPU flat out.