m5ad.16xlarge

Analysis

The m5ad.16xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5ad series with 64 vCPUs and 256 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.16xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $2.75/hour, 17% less ($397 a month). The other variants are the m5.16xlarge at $3.07, the m5d.16xlarge at $3.62 and the m5n.16xlarge at $3.81.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $2,287 a month per instance: $2.15/hour against $5.28/hour, a 146% spread.

On demand it costs $3.30/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $2,406 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 (4 x 600 GB NVMe SSD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: 12 Gigabit.

Looking beyond its own line, 13 of 35 current types with 64 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the m6g.16xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $2.46/hour.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $2.08/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $1.42/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 89% to the bill at $6.24/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.