t3a.xlarge

Analysis

The t3a.xlarge is a general purpose instance in the t3a series with 4 vCPUs and 16 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 $105 a month per instance: $0.0986/hour against $0.2419/hour, a 145% spread.

At $0.1504/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $110 a month, the t3a.xlarge 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.xlarge on Intel Skylake E5 2686 v5 costs 11% more, and no others also sit above it.

It is size 6 of 7 in the t3a series. Stepping up to the t3a.2xlarge gives 8 vCPUs and 32 GiB for $110 more a month. Dropping to the t3a.large saves $54.90 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 $0.0943/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.0650/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 49% to the bill at $0.2240/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.