m8in.large

Analysis

The m8in.large is a general purpose instance in the m8in 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, 46% less ($56.44 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m8i-flex.large at $0.1006, the m8i.large at $0.1058 and the m8gd.large at $0.1153.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $34.84 a month per instance: $0.1671/hour against $0.2148/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: 87% of the 354 current types in the family cost less than its $0.0835 per vCPU-hour. The premium mostly pays for a newer processor or a specialised configuration. On demand it is $0.1671/hour in US East (N. Virginia), or $122 for a 730-hour month.

Looking beyond its own line, 34 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.