r5.8xlarge

Analysis

The r5.8xlarge is a memory optimized instance in the r5 series with 32 vCPUs and 256 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 (up to 3.1 GHz), which makes it memory-heavy at 8 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the r5a.8xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $1.81/hour, 10% less ($152 a month). The other variants are the r5ad.8xlarge at $2.10, the r5d.8xlarge at $2.30 and the r5b.8xlarge at $2.38.

At $2.02/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $1,472 a month, the r5.8xlarge is one of the cheaper ways to buy memory optimized capacity: only 16% of the 385 current memory optimized types cost less per vCPU-hour than its $0.0630.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $876 a month per instance: $2.02/hour against $3.22/hour, a 60% spread.

It is 5.3% cheaper than the older r4.8xlarge on Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell), so staying on the previous generation costs more as well as being slower.

Looking beyond its own line, 6 of 41 current types with 32 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the r6g.8xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $1.61/hour.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $1.27/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.8710/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 73% to the bill at $3.49/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.