m5ad.4xlarge

Analysis

The m5ad.4xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5ad series with 16 vCPUs and 64 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.4xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $0.6880/hour, 17% less ($99.28 a month). The other variants are the m5.4xlarge at $0.7680, the m5d.4xlarge at $0.9040 and the m5n.4xlarge at $0.9520.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $572 a month per instance: $0.5370/hour against $1.32/hour, a 146% spread.

On demand it costs $0.8240/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $602 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 300 GB NVMe SSD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: Up to 10 Gigabit.

Looking beyond its own line, 13 of 37 current types with 16 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the m6g.4xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.6160/hour.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.5190/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.3560/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 89% to the bill at $1.56/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.