i4i.4xlarge

Analysis

The i4i.4xlarge is a storage optimized instance in the i4i series with 16 vCPUs and 128 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) (up to 3.5 GHz), which makes it memory-heavy at 8 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the i4g.4xlarge on AWS Graviton2 costs $1.24/hour, 10% less ($100 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $597 a month per instance: $1.37/hour against $2.19/hour, a 60% spread.

On demand it costs $1.37/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $1,002 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for storage optimized types at the 36th percentile per vCPU ($0.0858 per vCPU-hour) and the 31st percentile per GiB ($0.0107 per GiB-hour).

Looking beyond its own line, 28 of 42 current types with 16 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the r6g.4xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.8064/hour.

It has local instance storage (1 x 3750 GB NVMe SSD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: Up to 25 Gigabit.

It is size 4 of 9 in the i4i series. Stepping up to the i4i.8xlarge gives 32 vCPUs and 256 GiB for $1,002 more a month. Dropping to the i4i.2xlarge saves $502 a month.