t3a.large

Analysis

The t3a.large is a general purpose instance in the t3a series with 2 vCPUs and 8 GiB of memory on AMD EPYC 7571 (up to 2.5 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $52.34 a month per instance: $0.0493/hour against $0.1210/hour, a 145% spread.

At $0.0752/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $54.90 a month, the t3a.large is one of the cheaper ways to buy general purpose capacity: only 7% of the 354 current general purpose types cost less per vCPU-hour than its $0.0376.

It is the cheapest of the 2 processor variants AWS sells at this size and generation. The t3.large on Intel Skylake E5 2686 v5 costs 11% more, and no others also sit above it.

It is size 5 of 7 in the t3a series. Stepping up to the t3a.xlarge gives 4 vCPUs and 16 GiB for $54.90 more a month. Dropping to the t3a.medium saves $27.45 a month. Unit price is not flat across the series ($0.00235 to $0.0376 per vCPU-hour), so the size changes the rate you pay.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.0471/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.0325/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 37% to the bill at $0.1028/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.