m8a.xlarge

Analysis

The m8a.xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m8a series with 4 vCPUs and 16 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.xlarge on AWS Graviton4 costs $0.1795/hour, 26% less ($46.66 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m8i-flex.xlarge at $0.2011, the m8i.xlarge at $0.2117 and the m8gd.xlarge at $0.2306.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $51.83 a month per instance: $0.2434/hour against $0.3144/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 $0.2434/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $178 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 42 current types with 4 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the t4g.xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.1344/hour. It is burstable, so it only suits workloads that do not run the CPU flat out.