m5ad.8xlarge

Analysis

The m5ad.8xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5ad series with 32 vCPUs and 128 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.8xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $1.38/hour, 17% less ($199 a month). The other variants are the m5.8xlarge at $1.54, the m5d.8xlarge at $1.81 and the m5n.8xlarge at $1.90.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $1,143 a month per instance: $1.07/hour against $2.64/hour, a 146% spread.

On demand it costs $1.65/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $1,203 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 600 GB NVMe SSD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: Up to 10 Gigabit.

Looking beyond its own line, 12 of 37 current types with 32 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the m6g.8xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $1.23/hour.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $1.04/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.7120/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 89% to the bill at $3.12/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.