i3en.large

Analysis

The i3en.large is a storage optimized instance in the i3en series with 2 vCPUs and 16 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.large on Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) costs $0.1560/hour, 31% less ($51.10 a month).

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $97.82 a month per instance: $0.2260/hour against $0.3600/hour, a 59% spread.

Looking beyond its own line, 38 of 44 current types with 2 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the r6g.large on AWS Graviton2 at $0.1008/hour.

On demand it costs $0.2260/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $165 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 (1 x 1250 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 $0.1540/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 68% of the time; three years brings it to $0.0980/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 41% to the bill at $0.3180/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.