Making cents of AWS Lambda MicroVM pricing
![An excerpt of the AWS Lambda pricing page, with the 'US East (N. Virgnia)' region selected, lists 2 'Dimension' rows, 'vCPU price per second' and 'Memory price per second (per GB)'. Prices in the right-hand column are expressed in [United States] dollars, to 10 decimal places, with no separation between banks of decimal digits. The higher of the two prices is less than one hundredth of one cent.'](/assets/images/aws-lambda-microvm-pricing-compute-us-east-1-20260622.png)
An AWS Lambda MicroVM provides an isolated environment for a container, but prices in tiny fractions of cents are difficult to evaluate.
AWS released Lambda "micro virtual machines" on June 22, 2026. How much do they cost? As a former math teacher, my immediate goal was to express the cost in units that make sense, rather than in fractions of cents to 8 decimal places!
8 hours of 1 vCPU with 2 GB of RAM costs just over $1. Only the ARM (Graviton) architecture is supported, not Intel/AMD.
The CPU-to-memory ratio is always 1 vCPU to 2 GB of RAM. The minimum you can provision is ¼ vCPU with ½ GB of RAM, and the maximum is 4 vCPUs with 8 GB of RAM. Scaling (to a peak of up to 4 times the baseline size that you provisioned) is automatic. Disk space is limited to 4 GB per vCPU. Billing is per second.
Each Lambda MicroVM provides a highly isolated environment for a container.
Writing, storing and reading a MicroVM image (memory contents, to reduce initialization time, plus disk contents) costs 2.4¢ per GB, for 1 start within 1 week (the minimum retention period). Every 1 suspend-resume cycle costs just over ½ ¢ per GB. Storage for each additional 1 week costs just under 2¢ per GB.
"Standard" (EC2) AWS data transfer rates apply. That's a series of articles unto itself.
References
- Lambda pricing page [Click "MicroVMs"]
- EC2 pricing page: Data Transfer | Data Transfer within the same AWS Region
- Lambda Developer Guide: MicroVM sizing | Disk space quota
- AWS Blog: "Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control: AWS Lambda introduces MicroVMs" (Micah Walter)
- What's New with AWS: "AWS introduces Lambda MicroVMs for isolated execution of user and AI-generated code"
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