HN Explorer

Ask HN: Lots of AWS credits expiring soon, ideas?

72 points by anonymouslenz ↗ HN
Hey HN,

Long story short I have a lot (~$10K) of AWS credits expiring in a few months. Any ideas on the best way to make money / do some good with those? I can't directly sell them. Thanks!

97 comments

[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 49.6 ms ] thread
m00dy
Spawn a bunch of a100
roboben
Depending on the altruism level of yourself, you could do something like BOINC or just mine coins?
cpursley
If it's not against the terms, maybe you can sell it at a big discount?
mtmail
Find a large prime number https://www.eff.org/awards/coop More ideas in an 8 year old thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9546609

I wish there were more mirrors to wikipedia dumps but not sure if few months make a difference https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mirroring_Wikimedia_project_...

SamWhited
Maybe run one of the large distributed computing projects like Folding@Home? https://foldingathome.org/
oniony
I thought Deep Mind had solved all of the folding we would ever need.

Did some digging and the answer is "apparently not": https://foldingathome.org/2020/12/08/protein-folding-and-rel...

danpalmer
That article is from 2020, but it seems there has been a lot of progress since then – https://www.deepmind.com/research/highlighted-research/alpha.... I think this might now be a solved problem, or at least it's not clear that Folding@Home is going to be the next breakthrough.
rovr138
Well, if Folding@Home's project still exists, I'm going with Deep Mind is not working with them or there's still space to help.
danpalmer
Or Folding@Home is barely active enough to decide to stop, or they have a sunk cost fallacy... there are other options.

While Folding@Home has some mindshare among techies of a certain age, I suspect it's no longer practical given the wide availability of much higher performance cloud computing, and I don't think it has ever been cost effective. I suspect it needs reevaluating in the modern era. The last time I was looking at the project at all seriously was in ~2006 I think.

rovr138
> Folding@home is one of the world's fastest computing systems. With heightened interest in the project as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,[8] the system achieved a speed of approximately 1.22 exaflops by late March 2020 and reached 2.43 exaflops by April 12, 2020,[9] making it the world's first exaflop computing system. This level of performance from its large-scale computing network has allowed researchers to run computationally costly atomic-level simulations of protein folding thousands of times longer than formerly achieved. Since its launch on October 1, 2000, Folding@home was involved in the production of 226 scientific research papers.[10] Results from the project's simulations agree well with experiments.[11][12][13]

Source, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

digitalsushi
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

Ballas
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.
XajniN
You can just put it in an older vehicle that doesn’t care
londons_explore
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.

londons_explore
old gasoline works just fine as long as it is mixed with new stuff...
ranit
This “solution” defeats the very intend of GP proposal to not use it :-)
plugin-baby
How about diesel?
londons_explore
Diesel isn't so bad about age, but you still need to watch out for water and rust building up in a tank of stored fuel over time.
dubcanada
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.

shawabawa3
> 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.

That is more or less correct.

Machines that aren't running anything are powered off to save money. so if you spend $10k in credits running a bunch of useless compute, that more or less converts into say $3k of wasted electricity (if we say 30% of AWS running costs are electricity, i just made that up, but it will be some non negligible percentage)

dubcanada
So if you have 100 servers running EC2 at 99% compacity, they turn off all the other machines? That doesn't sound correct. I imagine they have a good buffer and then maybe there is a subset that are powered down. I don't think you can power up a machine, launch the kernal VZ layer, connect to AWS and broadcast yourself, and what ever else it does in the 20 seconds it takes for a EC2 instance to be allocated to you, so there has to be a good buffer for people launching/tearing down EC2s constantly.

So basically there may be a few servers difference. So we are talking like a few kws, which is basically like 40 cents power wise using 4 cents a kwh.

bdavbdav
Sometimes it does take significantly longer than 20secs.
tracker1
I don't think they necessarily turn OFF said machines, but most computers for the past half decade will do lower power modes with a lot of efficiency. Most of the mini computers I've seen based on laptop skus (similar for servers, just many more cores) will run around 8-12W in idle state, but 10x or more that under load. I would asume many servers will be at least similar, with a higher top end.
Wowfunhappy
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.
api
Contribute to open source LLM training. Any projects?
leobg
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.

gitowiec
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
sokoloff
It's easy to add subaccounts. It's hard (to impossible) to limit them to an exact budget.
andersa
Only $10k? Time to run a massively over engineered and over priced micro service based web server for like one month.
stepbeek
CQRS time baby.
Ocha
one of the few times when CQRS is used properly
mikeravkine
I've been working on a project evaluating the Python and Javascripr programing performance of open-licensed large language models [1] but don't currently have the resources to run the larger 65B ones.

Any chance you'd be able to help run some evaluations?

[1] https://github.com/the-crypt-keeper/can-ai-code

maxdo
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.
smcleod
You might have enough to run up a few electron apps for a day or two. Maybe.
bravura
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

ghoshbishakh
wow this is some real advice. I fully agree!
jacurtis
As a PhD candidate myself, I have to say this is an amazing idea. Meet with your local university's CompSci department and they will have many good uses for them.

I don't need them, I have actually accrued a large collection of credits myself for the program. But another university may not be as fortunate, so this can be a huge help and be the difference in many research projects being completed or not. Overall, research benefits everybody, so this is a better use of the credits than using it to middle-finger Bezos that many comments are suggesting.

Especially because credits are more beneficial and needed than ever before right now. I can tell you from being in academia that they are pushing almost all research projects to find AI/ML angles on everything we do. Thats the type of research in demand right now by the major journals and publications so all the universities are pushing for this twist on all current research projects to improve the likelihood of being published. And as you know, doing anything with AI/ML can 10x - 100x the cost. So credits are more valued right now than ever before.

whitepoplar
Good idea, but make sure they don't accidentally blow past $10k, leaving you with a monster bill. People can be a little reckless with "free money".
manderson89
This. AWS Budgets to get notifications when they reach certain spend thresholds will be a must. Also you should probably setup an AWS organization and have them operate in a sub-account if you go this route.
throwawayadvsec
it's damn near impossible to get approved for enough GPU to do any serious research with random free credits it won't help much :/
dpz
best bet probably https://foldingathome.org/ unless there something specific you're interested in. Ai being all the rage good budget to play around with some gpus
bigdict
Finetune an LLM for your own application.
ghuntley
comedy mine dodge coin option
gear54rus
Capture auth packets of as many neighbours' wifi networks as you can and crack them on a GPU :)
Turing_Machine
Find some worthy open source projects and run mirrors/torrents for them?
darrenkopp
post your public key to github, the rest takes care of itself.
paolomaffei
I'm a bit confused why nobody suggested cryptocurrency mining? not feasible?
bpicolo
It's not permitted under any of the major cloud's ToS.
nwsm
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.

samus
I think this was a lot of people's first thought as well, but maybe we can brainstorm some other uses that provide a more direct benefit to persons in need, dare I say to society.
asim
Train a model then burn it to the ground.
wassimseif
Like previously mentioned. Definitely give it to a PhD student *NOT* in the first world institution.
r3trohack3r
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?

fckthisguy
A prepaid credit card, or virtual card (like those provided by Wise) would do the trick.

Unless AWS doesn't allow those.

sitzkrieg
they dont. thats why this situation sucks
5e92cb50239222b
Every time this is mentioned the usual counterargument is that not paying your bill does not free you of responsibility for it. You can still be taken to collectors or end up in court.
bdavbdav
It’s payment on account after use. Just because the card bounces doesn’t mean you’re not still on the hook for it