m8idb.2xlarge

Analysis

The m8idb.2xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m8idb series with 8 vCPUs and 32 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.2xlarge on AWS Graviton4 costs $0.3590/hour, 53% less ($295 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m8i-flex.2xlarge at $0.4022, the m8i.2xlarge at $0.4234 and the m8gd.2xlarge at $0.4613.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $160 a month per instance: $0.7638/hour against $0.9828/hour, a 29% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, São Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

Per vCPU it is one of the dearer general purpose types: 93% of the 354 current types in the family cost less than its $0.0955 per vCPU-hour. The premium mostly pays for the local NVMe disk. On demand it is $0.7638/hour in US East (N. Virginia), or $558 for a 730-hour month.

Looking beyond its own line, 38 of 42 current types with 8 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the t4g.2xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.2688/hour. It is burstable, so it only suits workloads that do not run the CPU flat out.