AWS Amazon EC2

a1.medium

Prev Gen

Part of the A1 General Purpose family — Balanced compute, memory, and networking for a wide range of workloads.

Name:aGeneral Purpose (1st Gen Graviton)11st GenerationmediumMedium

On-demand, Linux

$0.0255/ hr

~$18.62/mo · lowest in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), ap-south-1

Savings Plan, Linux

$0.0127/ hr

From, with a 3-year Compute Savings Plan, No Upfront: −50% vs on-demand rate (us-east-1)

Per unit

$0.0255/ vCPU-hr

$0.0127/GB-hr

Compute

1vCPUs

1 threads • arm64

Memory

2GB

2.0 GB / vCPU

Network

Up to 10 Gbps

Standard

Storage & EBS

EBSOnly

EBS only

Alternatives to a1.medium

Option	Price vs a1.medium	Why look at it
c6g.medium Compare →	+33%+$0.0085/hr Linux on-demand, us-east-1	Newer generation, same vCPU and RAM
c7g.medium Compare →	+42%+$0.0108/hr Linux on-demand, us-east-1	Newer generation, same vCPU and RAM
c8g.medium Compare →	+56%+$0.0144/hr Linux on-demand, us-east-1	Newer generation, same vCPU and RAM

On Google Cloud

The nearest Google Cloud machines to a1.medium by vCPU and memory, at On-demand Linux rates in Northern Virginia (us-east-1 ↔ us-east4).

Machine	Size	On-demand Linux	vs a1.medium
a1.mediumThis page · AWS, us-east-1	1 vCPU · 2 GiB	$0.0255/hr	—
n4a-highcpu-1same 1 vCPU and 2 GiB; Arm on both	1 vCPU · 2 GiB	$0.03248/hr	27% more
c4a-highcpu-1same 1 vCPU and 2 GiB; Arm on both	1 vCPU · 2 GiB	$0.03788/hr	49% more

Matched on vCPU and memory, then CPU vendor, then rate; a larger size is offered only when nothing is the same size. On-demand Linux only: Spot and commitments work differently on the two clouds, so they aren't compared here.

Technical Specifications & Limits

Hardware specs, container thresholds, and system limits

Compute & Processor

ProcessorAWS Graviton Processor

Architecturearm64 (ARM64 (Graviton))

vCPUs / Threads1 vCPUs

Physical Cores—

Clock Speed2.3 GHz

Intel AVX / AVX2No

Intel Turbo BoostNo

Bare Metal—

Performance & Benchmarks

CoreMark Score11,878

CoreMark / vCPU11,877.9 / core

FFmpeg Transcoding—

CoreMark per Dollar465,804 score / $

Cost per vCPU-hr$0.0255

Cost per GB-hr$0.0127

Containers & Kubernetes

EKS Max Pods—

Max ENIs—

IPv4/v6 per ENI—

Total Addressable IPs—

CNI Prefix Delegation—

Networking & Bandwidth

Network PerformanceUp to 10 Gbps

Baseline Bandwidth—

Burst / Peak Bandwidth—

Enhanced NetworkingYes

EFA SupportNo

IPv6 SupportNative Dual-Stack Supported

Storage & EBS Optimization

Storage ConfigurationEBS only

Local NVMe DiskNone (EBS only)

EBS Baseline Throughput—

EBS Max Throughput—

EBS Baseline IOPS—

EBS Max / Burst IOPS—

Dedicated EBS ThroughputUp to 3500 Mbps

Platform & Architecture Details

Hypervisor / System—

Nitro Enclaves—

Normalization Factor2

Generation StatusPrevious Generation

Rates by region

Live on-demand rates across all global AWS cloud regions

Lowest Price Region

$0.0255/ hr

Asia Pacific (Mumbai) (ap-south-1)

Highest Price Region

$0.0333/ hr

Asia Pacific (Sydney) (ap-southeast-2)

Global Fleet Average

$0.0283/ hr

Across all active regions

Regional Coverage

9regions

Available worldwide

Linux — Available in all 9 regions
Region	On-Demand Price	% vs On-Demand Rate
ap-south-1 Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Lowest	$0.0255
ap-southeast-1 Asia Pacific (Singapore)	$0.0294
ap-southeast-2 Asia Pacific (Sydney) Highest	$0.0333
ap-northeast-1 Asia Pacific (Tokyo)	$0.0321
eu-central-1 EU (Frankfurt)	$0.0291
eu-west-1 EU (Ireland)	$0.0288
us-east-1 US East (N. Virginia) Lowest	$0.0255
us-east-2 US East (Ohio) Lowest	$0.0255
us-west-2 US West (Oregon) Lowest	$0.0255

Savings Plans: what to know

A Savings Plan commits you to a dollar amount per hour of spend for one or three years, not to an instance: usage up to that amount is billed at the plan's rates and the rest at on-demand, and unused commitment is still billed.
A Compute Savings Plan follows your usage across instance families, sizes, regions and operating systems; an EC2 Instance Savings Plan is locked to one family in one region in exchange for a lower rate (what that flexibility costs).
In US East (N. Virginia) (us-east-1), the 3-year Compute Savings Plan rate (No Upfront) for a1.medium on Linux is 50% of the on-demand rate, so the instance has to run at least 50% of the hours for the commitment to cost less than on-demand.
Rates are AWS's effective hourly rate for each payment option; All Upfront pays the whole term's commitment at purchase, which is why its hourly rate is lower; Partial Upfront (at least half up front) isn't shown on this page. The Savings Plans calculator has all three and sizes a commitment for this instance or a mix of them. How AWS applies a plan each hour: how Compute Savings Plans decide what they cover. Sizing one for elastic workloads: managing Compute Savings Plans.