i3en.2xlarge

Analysis

The i3en.2xlarge is a storage optimized instance in the i3en series with 8 vCPUs and 64 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.

Within the same generation and size, the i3.2xlarge on Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) costs $0.6240/hour, 31% less ($204 a month).

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $391 a month per instance: $0.9040/hour against $1.44/hour, a 59% spread.

Looking beyond its own line, 38 of 45 current types with 8 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the r6g.2xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.4032/hour.

On demand it costs $0.9040/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $660 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 (2 x 2500 GB NVMe SSD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: Up to 25 Gigabit.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.6160/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 68% of the time; three years brings it to $0.3930/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 41% to the bill at $1.27/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.