AWS t3.microvsAWS t3.xlarge

t3.micro pairs 2 vCPUs with 1GB of RAM at $0.0104/hr On-Demand (about $7/mo at 24×7). t3.xlarge pairs 4 vCPUs with 16GB at $0.1664/hr (~$120/mo). t3.micro is 1500% cheaper per hour than t3.xlarge ($0.1560/hr gap).

Because both instances are in the **t3 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: t3.micro gives you 2 vCPUs and 1GB of RAM, t3.xlarge gives you 4 vCPUs and 16GB. 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 t3.micro delivers ~1459% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (95673 vs 6136 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 (1533 vs 3116) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when t3.micro drops to $0.0039/hr and t3.xlarge drops to $0.0521/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick t3.micro when your workload is closer to burstable general-purpose (bursty traffic — web apps, dev/test boxes, CI runners, small databases). Pick t3.xlarge 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.