m8i-flex.large

Analysis

The m8i-flex.large is a general purpose instance in the m8i-flex series with 2 vCPUs and 8 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) (up to 3.9 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, 11% less ($7.88 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m8i.large at $0.1058, the m8gd.large at $0.1153 and the m8a.large at $0.1217.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $43.58 a month per instance: $0.1006/hour against $0.1603/hour, a 59% spread.

On demand it costs $0.1006/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $73.40 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 36th percentile per vCPU ($0.0503 per vCPU-hour) and the 36th percentile per GiB ($0.0126 per GiB-hour).

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the m7i-flex.large on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) ($3.50 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor.

Looking beyond its own line, 15 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.