r9g.12xlarge

Analysis

The r9g.12xlarge is a memory optimized instance in the r9g series with 48 vCPUs and 384 GiB of memory on AWS Graviton5 (up to 3.3 GHz), which makes it memory-heavy at 8 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Frankfurt saves $464 a month per instance: $3.08/hour against $3.72/hour, a 21% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, São Paulo, Ireland, London, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

It is the cheapest of the 2 processor variants AWS sells at this size and generation. The r9gd.12xlarge on AWS Graviton5 costs 25% more, and no others also sit above it.

At $3.08/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $2,250 a month, the r9g.12xlarge is one of the cheaper ways to buy memory optimized capacity: only 19% of the 385 current memory optimized types cost less per vCPU-hour than its $0.0642.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 9.0% more than the r8g.12xlarge on AWS Graviton4 ($186 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor.

Looking beyond its own line, 8 of 40 current types with 48 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the r6g.12xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $2.42/hour.