m5d.24xlarge

Analysis

The m5d.24xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5d series with 96 vCPUs and 384 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.24xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $4.13/hour, 24% less ($946 a month). The other variants are the m5.24xlarge at $4.61, the m5ad.24xlarge at $4.94 and the m5n.24xlarge at $5.71.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $2,348 a month per instance: $5.42/hour against $8.64/hour, a 59% spread.

It has local instance storage (4 x 900 GB NVMe SSD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: 25 Gigabit.

On demand it costs $5.42/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $3,960 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, 10 of 28 current types with 96 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the hpc6a.48xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R13 at $2.88/hour.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $3.42/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $2.34/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 81% to the bill at $9.84/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.