m8ine.2xlarge

Analysis

The m8ine.2xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m8ine 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, 57% less ($348 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.

Its price is almost flat across the 2 regions that offer it ($0.8354 to $0.8354/hour), so latency and data residency should decide where it runs. It is not offered in Ohio, Canada Central, São Paulo, Ireland, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

Per vCPU it is one of the dearer general purpose types: 99% of the 354 current types in the family cost less than its $0.1044 per vCPU-hour. The premium mostly pays for a newer processor or a specialised configuration. On demand it is $0.8354/hour in US East (N. Virginia), or $610 for a 730-hour month.

Looking beyond its own line, 40 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.