m5dn.2xlarge

Analysis

The m5dn.2xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5dn series with 8 vCPUs and 32 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Platinum 8259 (Cascade Lake) (up to 3.1 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the m5a.2xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $0.3440/hour, 37% less ($146 a month). The other variants are the m5.2xlarge at $0.3840, the m5ad.2xlarge at $0.4120 and the m5d.2xlarge at $0.4520.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $114 a month per instance: $0.5440/hour against $0.7000/hour, a 29% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, São Paulo, London, Mumbai and Sydney, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

On demand it costs $0.5440/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $397 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 71st percentile per vCPU ($0.0680 per vCPU-hour) and the 71st percentile per GiB ($0.0170 per GiB-hour).

Looking beyond its own line, 29 of 42 current types with 8 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the t4g.2xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.2688/hour. It is burstable, so it only suits workloads that do not run the CPU flat out.