m6a.xlarge

Analysis

The m6a.xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m6a series with 4 vCPUs and 16 GiB of memory on AMD EPYC 7R13 (up to 3.6 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

It costs the same as the older m5a.xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571, so the move up a generation is free. The newer m7a.xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R14 is 34% dearer at $0.2318/hour.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $120 a month per instance: $0.1111/hour against $0.2754/hour, a 148% spread.

Within the same generation and size, the m6g.xlarge on AWS Graviton2 costs $0.1540/hour, 11% less ($13.72 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m6gd.xlarge at $0.1808, the m6i.xlarge at $0.1920 and the m6id.xlarge at $0.2373.

At $0.1728/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $126 a month, the m6a.xlarge is one of the cheaper ways to buy general purpose capacity: only 17% of the 354 current general purpose types cost less per vCPU-hour than its $0.0432.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.1143/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 66% of the time; three years brings it to $0.0784/hour, 55% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $0.3568/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.