m6i.large

Analysis

The m6i.large is a general purpose instance in the m6i series with 2 vCPUs and 8 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) (up to 3.5 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the m6g.large on AWS Graviton2 costs $0.0770/hour, 20% less ($13.87 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m6a.large at $0.0864, the m6gd.large at $0.0904 and the m6id.large at $0.1187.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $41.61 a month per instance: $0.0960/hour against $0.1530/hour, a 59% spread.

On demand it costs $0.0960/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $70.08 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 29th percentile per vCPU ($0.0480 per vCPU-hour) and the 28th percentile per GiB ($0.0120 per GiB-hour).

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.0635/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 66% of the time; three years brings it to $0.0435/hour, 55% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $0.1880/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

The newer m7i.large on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) is 5.0% dearer at $0.1008/hour.