m8a.2xlarge

Analysis

The m8a.2xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m8a series with 8 vCPUs and 32 GiB of memory on AMD EPYC 9R45 (up to Up to 4.5 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the m8g.2xlarge on AWS Graviton4 costs $0.3590/hour, 26% less ($93.32 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m8i-flex.2xlarge at $0.4022, the m8i.2xlarge at $0.4234 and the m8gd.2xlarge at $0.4613.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $104 a month per instance: $0.4869/hour against $0.6289/hour, a 29% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, São Paulo, London, Singapore and Sydney, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

On demand it costs $0.4869/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $355 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 62nd percentile per vCPU ($0.0609 per vCPU-hour) and the 62nd percentile per GiB ($0.0152 per GiB-hour).

Looking beyond its own line, 26 of 42 current types with 8 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the t4g.2xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.2688/hour. It is burstable, so it only suits workloads that do not run the CPU flat out.