m5dn.xlarge

Analysis

The m5dn.xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5dn series with 4 vCPUs and 16 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.xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $0.1720/hour, 37% less ($73.00 a month). The other variants are the m5.xlarge at $0.1920, the m5ad.xlarge at $0.2060 and the m5d.xlarge at $0.2260.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $56.94 a month per instance: $0.2720/hour against $0.3500/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 $0.2720/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $199 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, 28 of 42 current types with 4 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the t4g.xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.1344/hour. It is burstable, so it only suits workloads that do not run the CPU flat out.