m7a.4xlarge

Analysis

The m7a.4xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m7a series with 16 vCPUs and 64 GiB of memory on AMD EPYC 9R14 (up to Up to 3.7 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the m7g.4xlarge on AWS Graviton3 costs $0.6528/hour, 30% less ($200 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m7i-flex.4xlarge at $0.7661, the m7i.4xlarge at $0.8064 and the m7gd.4xlarge at $0.8543.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 34% more than the m6a.4xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R13 ($172 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer m8a.4xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R45 is 5.0% dearer at $0.9738/hour.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $197 a month per instance: $0.9274/hour against $1.20/hour, a 29% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, São Paulo, Mumbai and Singapore, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

On demand it costs $0.9274/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $677 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 54th percentile per vCPU ($0.0580 per vCPU-hour) and the 54th percentile per GiB ($0.0145 per GiB-hour).