m5.large

Analysis

The m5.large is a general purpose instance in the m5 series with 2 vCPUs and 8 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 (up to 3.1 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the m5a.large on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $0.0860/hour, 10% less ($7.30 a month). The other variants are the m5ad.large at $0.1030, the m5d.large at $0.1130 and the m5n.large at $0.1190.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $41.61 a month per instance: $0.0960/hour against $0.1530/hour, a 59% spread.

On demand it costs $0.0960/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $70.08 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 29th percentile per vCPU ($0.0480 per vCPU-hour) and the 28th percentile per GiB ($0.0120 per GiB-hour).

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.0600/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 62% of the time; three years brings it to $0.0410/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $0.1880/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

It is 4.0% cheaper than the older m4.large on Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 (Haswell), so staying on the previous generation costs more as well as being slower.