c8i.xlarge

Analysis

The c8i.xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c8i series with 4 vCPUs and 8 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.xlarge on AWS Graviton4 costs $0.1595/hour, 15% less ($20.37 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the c8i-flex.xlarge at $0.1780, the c8gd.xlarge at $0.1960 and the c8a.xlarge at $0.2155.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $74.05 a month per instance: $0.1874/hour against $0.2889/hour, a 54% spread.

Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $0.3714/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

On demand it costs $0.1874/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $137 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for compute optimized types at the 47th percentile per vCPU ($0.0469 per vCPU-hour) and the 50th percentile per GiB ($0.0234 per GiB-hour).

Looking beyond its own line, 15 of 31 current types with 4 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the c6g.xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.1360/hour.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the c7i.xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) ($6.51 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor.