m8g.xlarge

Analysis

The m8g.xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m8g series with 4 vCPUs and 16 GiB of memory on AWS Graviton4 (up to 2.7 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $115 a month per instance: $0.1283/hour against $0.2861/hour, a 123% spread.

It is the cheapest of the 5 processor variants AWS sells at this size and generation. The m8a.xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R45 costs 36% more, and the m8i-flex.xlarge, the m8i.xlarge and the m8gd.xlarge also sit above it.

At $0.1795/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $131 a month, the m8g.xlarge is one of the cheaper ways to buy general purpose capacity: only 20% of the 354 current general purpose types cost less per vCPU-hour than its $0.0449.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 10% more than the m7g.xlarge on AWS Graviton3 ($11.91 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer m9g.xlarge on AWS Graviton5 is 9.0% dearer at $0.1957/hour.

Looking beyond its own line, 7 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.