m5ad.12xlarge

Analysis

The m5ad.12xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5ad 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.

Within the same generation and size, the m5a.12xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $2.06/hour, 17% less ($298 a month). The other variants are the m5.12xlarge at $2.30, the m5d.12xlarge at $2.71 and the m5n.12xlarge at $2.86.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $1,715 a month per instance: $1.61/hour against $3.96/hour, a 146% spread.

On demand it costs $2.47/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $1,805 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 41st percentile per vCPU ($0.0515 per vCPU-hour) and the 41st percentile per GiB ($0.0129 per GiB-hour).

It has local instance storage (2 x 900 GB NVMe SSD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: 10 Gigabit.

Looking beyond its own line, 12 of 36 current types with 48 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the m6g.12xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $1.85/hour.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $1.56/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $1.07/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 89% to the bill at $4.68/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.