Ask HN: A lot of AWS credit expiring quickly, concepts?

Phil Tadros · June 1, 2023

2023-06-01 06:59:33

Find a PhD student that needs GPUs for their research but isn’t in a first world institution. You could reach out to a few top professors and ask for a referral to someone promising.

Ie be a science benefactor

Host a kernel.org or Debian or gentoo or some other mirror for awhile. Talk to the maintainers first so they realize it’ll be a “short term” mirror which they may not want to hassle with.

If I had a thousand gallons of unusable gasoline that was going to expire in a few months, I would just be proud that I found a way to not expend it

My metaphor falls apart if those 10,000 dollars of AWS credits are all coming from green energy, though

You are implying that AWS turns off the machine if this person doesn’t spend his $10k. I don’t know exactly if that is correct, but it doesn’t sound like what actually happens.

If you run it through AWS Montreal the energy is 100% hydro, so if they did care about that, it’s possible to avoid.

I would agree unless the gasoline could potentially be used for scientific research that would allow less gasoline to be produced in the future. Which seems plausible for AWS credits.

What do you do with expired gasoline? I’m sure it does not become much less of an environmental issue after expiry? It seems to me that it would just become a lot harder to dispose of safely.

nah – old fuel is especially bad for old vehicles. They really don’t like having the fuel separate into waxy components in carburettors and clog everything.

Just mix it 50/50 with fresh fuel and you’re good to use it anywhere.

Put an email in your bio so folks who need to get something done can contact you. Even if you cannot sell the credits directly, who says you cannot run something for someone else? Say, as a consulting contract.

If that’s too complicated, find some open source AI project that needs compute. RWKV. OpenAssistant, or something like that.

The suggestion of donating these concerns me.

IIUC these credits aren’t transferable so you’d have to set them up with access to an AWS sub account attached to your credit card. Last time I used AWS personally (it’s been a while) there was no way to limit spending in a subaccount.

Giving someone access to your account to burn through exactly $10k in credits where you are on the hook sounds… financially dangerous.

Am I missing something? Is there a way to make sure they only spend the $10k in credits and not a penny more?

The big cloud providers attempt to detect and stop crypto mining. I’m not sure if there are ways around it, but if so, they probably involve mining incredibly inefficiently.

Personally I would look into standing up one of the popular AI models like stable diffusion and running a paid service on it.

Donate it for learners. There’s plenty of people doing certification. I’m sure a lot of them would like to do “hands on”. If I were you I would go to places like examtopics and advertise. 100 of dollars would be enough, and it’s easy to add subaccounts to AWS

we had same issue, at that time it was we will not hire few developers or pay the bill to big corp, we switch in 1-2 weeks to hetzner on dev and stg, and saved good amount of money.

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