vt1.6xlarge

Analysis

The vt1.6xlarge is a media accelerator instances instance in the vt1 series with 24 vCPUs and 48 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Platinum 8259CL (up to 2.5 GHz), which makes it compute-heavy at 2 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $246 a month per instance: $1.30/hour against $1.64/hour, a 26% spread. It is not offered in Ohio, Canada Central, São Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

On demand it costs $1.30/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $949 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for media accelerator instances types at the 50th percentile per vCPU ($0.0542 per vCPU-hour) and the 50th percentile per GiB ($0.0271 per GiB-hour).

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.8190/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.5616/hour, 57% below on demand.

It is size 2 of 3 in the vt1 series. Stepping up to the vt1.24xlarge gives 96 vCPUs and 192 GiB for $2,847 more a month. Dropping to the vt1.3xlarge saves $475 a month.