m6in.large

Analysis

The m6in.large is a general purpose instance in the m6in 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, 45% less ($45.43 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 m6i.large at $0.0960.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $60.35 a month per instance: $0.1392/hour against $0.2219/hour, a 59% spread.

On demand it costs $0.1392/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $102 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 73rd percentile per vCPU ($0.0696 per vCPU-hour) and the 73rd percentile per GiB ($0.0174 per GiB-hour).

Looking beyond its own line, 29 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.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.0877/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.0537/hour, 61% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 66% to the bill at $0.2312/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.