New low-cost burstable Amazon EC2 T8i instances are generally available

Thousands of customers run lightweight workloads on T3 instances that need small, cost-effective compute: microservices, low-traffic websites, dev/test environments, small databases, data-processing jobs, and short-duration compute tasks. The T family's burstable model — a baseline CPU level with the ability to burst above it using CPU credits — has been a staple of that crowd for years.

As customers modernize, migrate from on-premises, adopt event-driven and microservice architectures, and experiment with AI inference workloads, they've asked for newer-generation cost-optimized small instances, better price performance, and a seamless migration path. T8i answers all three.

What T8i delivers

• Up to 30% better price performance. Powered by the AWS Nitro System on custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Granite Rapids), T8i lowers total cost of ownership.
• Up to 70% higher compute performance, up to 1.25x higher network bandwidth, and up to 2.4x higher EBS bandwidth versus T3.
• Seamless upgrade from T3. Same CPU credit system, same familiar lightweight compute options — selecting T8i instead of T3 is effectively a size change, not a redesign. No re-architecture needed to benefit immediately.
• A cost-effective entry point for new customers: low-to-moderate CPU utilization workloads, batch processing, event-driven functions, and CI/CD pipelines.

Bottom line

T8i is the incremental, low-risk upgrade path the T-family installed base has been waiting for: same burstable model, materially better price performance and I/O headroom. For the unglamorous half of the estate — login gateways, small databases, CI runners, low-traffic sites — this is the modern cost-optimized target.