r7a.4xlarge

Analysis

The r7a.4xlarge is a memory optimized instance in the r7a series with 16 vCPUs and 128 GiB of memory on AMD EPYC 9R14 (up to Up to 3.7 GHz), which makes it memory-heavy at 8 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the r7g.4xlarge on AWS Graviton3 costs $0.8568/hour, 30% less ($263 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the r7i.4xlarge at $1.06, the r7gd.4xlarge at $1.09 and the r7iz.4xlarge at $1.49.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 34% more than the r6a.4xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R13 ($226 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer r8a.4xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R45 is 5.0% dearer at $1.28/hour.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Frankfurt saves $183 a month per instance: $1.22/hour against $1.47/hour, a 21% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, São Paulo, London, Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

On demand it costs $1.22/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $889 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for memory optimized types at the 46th percentile per vCPU ($0.0761 per vCPU-hour) and the 62nd percentile per GiB ($0.00951 per GiB-hour).