AWS m8a.mediumvsAWS m8azn.large

m8a.medium pairs 1 vCPUs with 4GB of RAM at $0.0609/hr On-Demand (about $44/mo at 24×7). m8azn.large pairs 2 vCPUs with 8GB at $0.2065/hr (~$149/mo). m8a.medium is 239% cheaper per hour than m8azn.large ($0.1456/hr gap).

Both are generation-8 general-purpose instances, but they run on different silicon: **m8a.medium** is AMD EPYC (x86_64), **m8azn.large** is AMD EPYC (x86_64). AMD variants (suffix `a`) are typically 10% cheaper than Intel siblings at comparable single-thread performance. Graviton variants (suffix `g`) are usually 20–40% cheaper but require ARM64-compatible binaries — most modern Linux stacks are fine, but verify any compiled extensions, native modules, or third-party binaries before migrating. Same vCPU/RAM ratio, same network performance class, different processor.

On raw price-per-performance, the two are m8a.medium delivers ~190% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (87479 vs 30127 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 (5242 vs 12456) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when m8a.medium drops to $0.0205/hr and m8azn.large drops to $0.0572/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick m8a.medium when your workload is closer to general-purpose (balanced general-purpose workloads with a 1:4 vCPU-to-memory ratio). Pick m8azn.large when it's closer to general-purpose (balanced general-purpose workloads with a 1:4 vCPU-to-memory ratio). 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.