Comparative Cost and Performance Analysis of General-Purpose Compute Instances Across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI
This paper conducts a comprehensive evaluation of general-purpose compute instances offered by leading cloud service providers, focusing on the interplay between processor architecture, cost, and performance metrics. Utilizing standardized configurations and benchmarking methodologies across Intel, AMD, and ARM architectures, this research delineates the tradeoffs inherent in cloud infrastructure selection. Results demonstrate ARM-based instances provide superior cost-efficiency for scale-out and cloud-native workloads, while Intel architectures maintain dominance in legacy-sensitive, performance-critical environments. Insights derived aim to empower computing professionals in optimizing cloud resource allocation, maximizing computational throughput per expense, and guiding strategic deployments within evolving distributed systems paradigms.