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Amazon has made its T8i burstable EC2 instances generally available. They run on the Nitro System and custom sixth generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Granite Rapids), and AWS positions them as a direct successor to the widely used T3 family, with up to 30% better price performance according to the original announcement.
What happened
T8i comes in four sizes only: nano, micro, small and medium. Each has 2 vCPUs presented as a single core, with 0.25, 0.5, 1 and 2 GiB of memory respectively. Baseline performance per vCPU is 5% for nano, 10% for micro and 20% for small and medium; CPU credits earned per hour are 3, 6, 12 and 12. Network burst bandwidth is up to 6.25 Gbps across all sizes.
Compared with T3, AWS cites up to 70% higher compute performance, up to 1.25x network bandwidth and up to 2.4x EBS bandwidth. The credit model is unchanged: Standard and Unlimited modes, with Unlimited as the default on T8i. Tenancy is shared only — no Dedicated instances or Dedicated Hosts. Purchase options at launch are On-Demand and Spot, with a Savings Plan option described as coming soon. The micro and small sizes are included in the AWS Free Tier.
Regions at launch include Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris), Canada (Central), four US regions and several in Asia Pacific. For workloads that outgrow medium, AWS points to M8i Flex, which it also describes as up to 30% better price performance than equivalent T3 instances and scalable to 16xlarge.
Why it matters
Small and medium teams run a lot of infrastructure in exactly this bracket: staging and demo environments, internal tools, low-traffic sites, login gateways, small databases, CI runners, cron-style batch jobs. Many of these still sit on T3 instances provisioned years ago and never revisited. A generational move that keeps the same credit model, the same sizes and the same tooling is one of the rare cost changes that does not require an architecture discussion.
The caveats are equally practical. Unlimited mode is the default, so a workload that bursts steadily is billed for surplus credits rather than throttled — that is fine for spiky traffic and expensive for something that quietly needs sustained CPU. And with a ceiling of 2 GiB of memory, T8i does not cover everything T3 covered.
What to do
- Pull your current T3 inventory and sort by monthly spend. Anything nano to medium is a candidate; anything larger needs a different family.
- Move non-production environments first, then measure. CPU credit balance and burst behaviour, not instance type, decide whether the change actually saves money.
- Review credit mode per workload. If a service sits above baseline for hours at a time, a burstable instance of any generation is the wrong shape.
- Check region availability before planning a migration wave; coverage is partial and will expand over time.