AWS c7a.largevsAWS c7a.xlarge

c7a.large pairs 2 vCPUs with 4GB of RAM at $0.1026/hr On-Demand (about $74/mo at 24×7). c7a.xlarge pairs 4 vCPUs with 8GB at $0.2053/hr (~$148/mo). c7a.large is 100% cheaper per hour than c7a.xlarge ($0.1026/hr gap).

Because both instances are in the **c7a family**, the only thing that changes between them is sizing — same silicon, same architecture (AMD EPYC (x86_64)), same burstable/sustained behavior. The choice is purely about how much capacity you actually need: c7a.large gives you 2 vCPUs and 4GB of RAM, c7a.xlarge gives you 4 vCPUs and 8GB. AWS scales pricing close to linearly within a family, so picking the right size is mostly about right-sizing your workload, not getting a better deal per vCPU.

On raw price-per-performance, the two are c7a.large delivers ~95% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (41066 vs 21015 points per $1/hr). That's the cleanest signal we have for "which one runs your workload faster per dollar," but it only matters if your workload is single-thread-bound; for parallel workloads the multi-core scores (8112 vs 16796) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when c7a.large drops to $0.0311/hr and c7a.xlarge drops to $0.0684/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick c7a.large when your workload is closer to compute-optimized (CPU-bound work — batch processing, web servers under sustained load, game servers). Pick c7a.xlarge when it's closer to compute-optimized (CPU-bound work — batch processing, web servers under sustained load, game servers). When neither side is obviously right, the cheaper hourly rate usually wins for fault-tolerant batch workloads, while the higher single-core score usually wins for latency-sensitive web traffic. The regional pricing tables linked from each instance page below show where each is currently cheapest — sometimes a >20% regional gap flips the comparison entirely.