m8a.medium

Analysis

The m8a.medium is a general purpose instance in the m8a series with 1 vCPU and 4 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.medium on AWS Graviton4 costs $0.0449/hour, 26% less ($11.67 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m8gd.medium at $0.0577, the m8gb.medium at $0.0727 and the m8gn.medium at $0.0728.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $12.96 a month per instance: $0.0609/hour against $0.0786/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 $0.0609/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $44.43 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, 8 of 13 current types with 1 vCPU and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the m6g.medium on AWS Graviton2 at $0.0385/hour.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the m7a.medium on AMD EPYC 9R14 ($2.12 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor.