m5d.8xlarge

Analysis

The m5d.8xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5d series with 32 vCPUs and 128 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.8xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $1.38/hour, 24% less ($315 a month). The other variants are the m5.8xlarge at $1.54, the m5ad.8xlarge at $1.65 and the m5n.8xlarge at $1.90.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $783 a month per instance: $1.81/hour against $2.88/hour, a 59% spread.

It has local instance storage (2 x 600 GB NVMe SSD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: 10 Gigabit.

On demand it costs $1.81/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $1,320 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 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 $1.14/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.7810/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 81% to the bill at $3.28/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.