AWS t4g.mediumvsAWS t4g.nano

t4g.medium pairs 2 vCPUs with 4GB of RAM at $0.0336/hr On-Demand (about $24/mo at 24×7). t4g.nano pairs 2 vCPUs with 0.5GB at $0.0042/hr (~$3/mo). t4g.nano is 87% cheaper per hour than t4g.medium ($0.0294/hr gap).

Because both instances are in the **t4g family**, the only thing that changes between them is sizing — same silicon, same architecture (AWS Graviton (ARM64)), same burstable/sustained behavior. The choice is purely about how much capacity you actually need: t4g.medium gives you 2 vCPUs and 4GB of RAM, t4g.nano gives you 2 vCPUs and 0.5GB. 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 t4g.nano delivers ~720% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (81042 vs 664286 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 (5244 vs 5354) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when t4g.medium drops to $0.0157/hr and t4g.nano drops to $0.0017/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick t4g.medium when your workload is closer to burstable general-purpose (bursty traffic — web apps, dev/test boxes, CI runners, small databases). Pick t4g.nano 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.