c7i.xlarge

Analysis

The c7i.xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c7i series with 4 vCPUs and 8 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.xlarge on AWS Graviton3 costs $0.1450/hour, 19% less ($24.46 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the c7i-flex.xlarge at $0.1696, the c7gd.xlarge at $0.1814 and the c7a.xlarge at $0.2053.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $70.52 a month per instance: $0.1785/hour against $0.2751/hour, a 54% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.1181/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 66% of the time; three years brings it to $0.0786/hour, 56% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $0.3625/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

On demand it costs $0.1785/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $130 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).

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the c6i.xlarge on Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) ($6.20 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer c8i.xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) is 5.0% dearer at $0.1874/hour.