i3en.24xlarge

Analysis

The i3en.24xlarge is a storage optimized instance in the i3en series with 96 vCPUs and 768 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 (up to 3.1 GHz), which makes it memory-heavy at 8 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $4,695 a month per instance: $10.85/hour against $17.28/hour, a 59% spread.

Looking beyond its own line, 29 of 35 current types with 96 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the r5a.24xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 at $5.42/hour.

On demand it costs $10.85/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $7,919 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for storage optimized types at the 58th percentile per vCPU ($0.1130 per vCPU-hour) and the 47th percentile per GiB ($0.0141 per GiB-hour).

It has local instance storage (8 x 7500 GB NVMe SSD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: 100 Gigabit.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $7.39/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 68% of the time; three years brings it to $4.72/hour, 56% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 41% to the bill at $15.26/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.