m5zn.large

Analysis

The m5zn.large is a general purpose instance in the m5zn series with 2 vCPUs and 8 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Platinum 8252 (up to 4.5 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the m5a.large on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $0.0860/hour, 48% less ($57.82 a month). The other variants are the m5.large at $0.0960, the m5ad.large at $0.1030 and the m5d.large at $0.1130.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $71.54 a month per instance: $0.1652/hour against $0.2632/hour, a 59% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, London and Mumbai, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

Per vCPU it is one of the dearer general purpose types: 84% of the 354 current types in the family cost less than its $0.0826 per vCPU-hour. The premium mostly pays for a newer processor or a specialised configuration. On demand it is $0.1652/hour in US East (N. Virginia), or $121 for a 730-hour month.

Looking beyond its own line, 33 of 41 current types with 2 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the t4g.large on AWS Graviton2 at $0.0672/hour. It is burstable, so it only suits workloads that do not run the CPU flat out.