m5.xlarge

Analysis

The m5.xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5 series with 4 vCPUs and 16 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.xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $0.1720/hour, 10% less ($14.60 a month). The other variants are the m5ad.xlarge at $0.2060, the m5d.xlarge at $0.2260 and the m5n.xlarge at $0.2380.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $83.22 a month per instance: $0.1920/hour against $0.3060/hour, a 59% spread.

On demand it costs $0.1920/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $140 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 $0.1210/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.0830/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $0.3760/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

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