i3.xlarge

Analysis

The i3.xlarge is a storage optimized instance in the i3 series with 4 vCPUs and 30.5 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) (up to 2.3 GHz), which makes it memory-heavy at 7.62 GiB of memory per vCPU.

It is the cheapest of the 2 processor variants AWS sells at this size and generation. The i3en.xlarge on Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 costs 45% more, and no others also sit above it.

At $0.3120/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $228 a month, the i3.xlarge is one of the cheaper ways to buy storage optimized capacity: only 14% of the 90 current storage optimized types cost less per vCPU-hour than its $0.0780.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $136 a month per instance: $0.3120/hour against $0.4980/hour, a 60% spread.

It has local instance storage (1 x 950 GB NVMe SSD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: Up to 10 Gigabit.

Looking beyond its own line, 22 of 45 current types with 4 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the r6g.xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.2016/hour.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.2140/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 69% of the time; three years brings it to $0.1510/hour, 52% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 59% to the bill at $0.4960/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.