c8i-flex.2xlarge

Analysis

The c8i-flex.2xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c8i-flex series with 8 vCPUs and 16 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) (up to 3.9 GHz), which makes it compute-heavy at 2 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the c8g.2xlarge on AWS Graviton4 costs $0.3190/hour, 10% less ($27.04 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the c8i.2xlarge at $0.3748, the c8gd.2xlarge at $0.3919 and the c8a.2xlarge at $0.4311.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $141 a month per instance: $0.3561/hour against $0.5488/hour, a 54% spread.

On demand it costs $0.3561/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $260 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for compute optimized types at the 38th percentile per vCPU ($0.0445 per vCPU-hour) and the 41st percentile per GiB ($0.0223 per GiB-hour).

Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $0.7057/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the c7i-flex.2xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) ($12.36 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor.

Looking beyond its own line, 12 of 31 current types with 8 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the c6g.2xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.2720/hour.