m8a.8xlarge

Analysis

The m8a.8xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m8a series with 32 vCPUs and 128 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.8xlarge on AWS Graviton4 costs $1.44/hour, 26% less ($373 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m8i-flex.8xlarge at $1.61, the m8i.8xlarge at $1.69 and the m8gd.8xlarge at $1.85.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $415 a month per instance: $1.95/hour against $2.52/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 $1.95/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $1,422 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, 22 of 37 current types with 32 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the m6g.8xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $1.23/hour.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the m7a.8xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R14 ($67.74 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor.