m5a.12xlarge

Analysis

The m5a.12xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5a series with 48 vCPUs and 192 GiB of memory on AMD EPYC 7571 (up to 2.5 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $1,445 a month per instance: $1.33/hour against $3.31/hour, a 148% spread.

It is the cheapest of the 5 processor variants AWS sells at this size and generation. The m5n.12xlarge on Intel Xeon Platinum 8259 (Cascade Lake) costs 38% more, and the m5.12xlarge, the m5ad.12xlarge and the m5d.12xlarge also sit above it.

At $2.06/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $1,507 a month, the m5a.12xlarge is one of the cheaper ways to buy general purpose capacity: only 15% of the 354 current general purpose types cost less per vCPU-hour than its $0.0430.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $1.30/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.8920/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $4.27/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

It is size 6 of 8 in the m5a series. Stepping up to the m5a.16xlarge gives 64 vCPUs and 256 GiB for $502 more a month. Dropping to the m5a.8xlarge saves $502 a month.