m8a.large

Analysis

The m8a.large is a general purpose instance in the m8a series with 2 vCPUs and 8 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.large on AWS Graviton4 costs $0.0898/hour, 26% less ($23.33 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m8i-flex.large at $0.1006, the m8i.large at $0.1058 and the m8gd.large at $0.1153.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $25.92 a month per instance: $0.1217/hour against $0.1572/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 $0.1217/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $88.86 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, 25 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.