m4.4xlarge

Analysis

The m4.4xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m4 series with 16 vCPUs and 64 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 (Haswell) (up to 2.4 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $345 a month per instance: $0.8000/hour against $1.27/hour, a 59% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.4956/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 62% of the time; three years brings it to $0.3456/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $1.54/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

On demand it costs $0.8000/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $584 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 35th percentile per vCPU ($0.0500 per vCPU-hour) and the 35th percentile per GiB ($0.0125 per GiB-hour).

The newer m5.4xlarge on Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 is 4.0% cheaper at $0.7680/hour, which makes the m4.4xlarge hard to justify for new deployments.

Looking beyond its own line, 10 of 37 current types with 16 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the m6g.4xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.6160/hour.