m5d.16xlarge

Analysis

The m5d.16xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5d series with 64 vCPUs and 256 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 (up to 3.1 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, 24% less ($631 a month). The other variants are the m5.16xlarge at $3.07, the m5ad.16xlarge at $3.30 and the m5n.16xlarge at $3.81.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $1,565 a month per instance: $3.62/hour against $5.76/hour, a 59% spread.

It has local instance storage (4 x 600 GB NVMe SSD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: 20 Gigabit.

On demand it costs $3.62/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $2,640 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 49th percentile per vCPU ($0.0565 per vCPU-hour) and the 49th percentile per GiB ($0.0141 per GiB-hour).

Looking beyond its own line, 16 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 $2.28/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $1.56/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 81% to the bill at $6.56/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.