r8a.medium

Analysis

The r8a.medium is a memory optimized instance in the r8a series with 1 vCPU and 8 GiB of memory on AMD EPYC 9R45 (up to Up to 4.5 GHz), which makes it memory-heavy at 8 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the r8g.medium on AWS Graviton4 costs $0.0589/hour, 26% less ($15.31 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the r8gd.medium at $0.0735, the r8gb.medium at $0.0911 and the r8gn.medium at $0.0911.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Frankfurt saves $12.03 a month per instance: $0.0799/hour against $0.0964/hour, a 21% spread. It is not offered in São Paulo, London, Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

Looking beyond its own line, 8 of 13 current types with 1 vCPU and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the r6g.medium on AWS Graviton2 at $0.0504/hour.

On demand it costs $0.0799/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $58.31 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for memory optimized types at the 49th percentile per vCPU ($0.0799 per vCPU-hour) and the 65th percentile per GiB ($0.00999 per GiB-hour).

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the r7a.medium on AMD EPYC 9R14 ($2.77 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor.