AWS t2.mediumvsAWS t2.micro

t2.medium pairs 2 vCPUs with 4GB of RAM at $0.0464/hr On-Demand (about $33/mo at 24×7). t2.micro pairs 1 vCPUs with 1GB at $0.0116/hr (~$8/mo). t2.micro is 75% cheaper per hour than t2.medium ($0.0348/hr gap).

Because both instances are in the **t2 family**, the only thing that changes between them is sizing — same silicon, same architecture (Intel Xeon (x86_64)), same burstable/sustained behavior. The choice is purely about how much capacity you actually need: t2.medium gives you 2 vCPUs and 4GB of RAM, t2.micro gives you 1 vCPUs and 1GB. 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 t2.micro delivers ~46% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (49569 vs 72328 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 (4051 vs 809) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when t2.medium drops to $0.0150/hr and t2.micro drops to $0.0034/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick t2.medium when your workload is closer to burstable general-purpose (bursty traffic — web apps, dev/test boxes, CI runners, small databases). Pick t2.micro when it's closer to burstable general-purpose (bursty traffic — web apps, dev/test boxes, CI runners, small databases). 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.