I am trying to help people out without AWS credits / ability to spend 10$ (maybe you are a student or don’t have an accepted debit / credit card, etc) a month on AWS to still take part in this course and I want to do this in a scalable way. Besides, free stuff is always fun!
I need a volunteer to see if they could apply here to join the AWS educate program. If you get 35$ or 40$ in credits we will be ready to go
Why this post? Cause I am trying to find a good solution to this and not getting far thus far.
So - let me know if you get the credits and we can go from there!
EDIT: BTW if we could get fast.ai on a list of participating institutions, this would give each student (assuming this works) 100$ in free credits. There is some account manager from AWS I ran into on Twitter that I could try pming with permission of @jeremy and maybe they could hook us up with whomever could help us. 100$ that is over 350 of p2.xlarge instance hours which is way more than enough for any reasonable or even slightly unreasonable use for this course
@radek@jeremy It’d be great if we (students) could ask our fellow colleagues (who won’t be using AWS) for signing up with AWS educate/Github student pack with their E-mail ID’s to receive a promocode. Since the promocode is not linked with any account, we can share it here.
That promocode would give 75$ to non credit card users and 150$ to credit card users.
A single shot of AWS credits in the amount of 75$ or 150$ is way more than anyone would need to participate in this course to the fullest extent Hence, if you can get this, I think you are set and we don’t need to worry about getting other people to get us more AWS credits.
To get the most mileage out of your credits going the spot instances route with persistent data might be your best bet - if you want to put in the effort - or if you don’t really care about that you could keep your work backed up on github and spin up spot instances using an AMI (super simple, under 0.25$ per hr).
Just as a sidenote, I asked for a volunteer in this thread as I don’t need more AWS credits myself Basically trying to work this out for people who didn’t receive the 500$ AWS credits and I didn’t want to apply myself as I am not sure if it would not mess with the credits I already have…
Of course I am planning on using all my credits and then I am planning on paying for AWS out of my own pocket, but that is not the point. I would be happy to use the AWS credits that I got to help others.
The problem is - and I have given this a lot of thought - that there is not a whole lot I can do with my credits to help you that makes sense. I could outline the both technical and logistical / time management reasons why I feel strongly this is the case, but it would turn this into a very long post. You can trust however that I have given this a lot of thought and have both yours and mine best interest in mind as I type these words.
Having said that, here is imho how this should look:
If you have a debit / credit card you can use with AWS and can spend 2.75$ dollars a week on this course, please follow these setup instructions. This buys you 10 p2.xlarge instance hours at ~22.5 cents per hour and pays for the 20 GB of persistent storage at 2$ per month. If this is an option available to you than my advice would be to take it and we need to get on with our lives.
If for some reason the above option is not available to you, please apply for AWS credits through AWS Educate or though the Github program (can someone provide a link to that please?). This will give you, in the worst case scenario 30$, and some people report getting 150$, it also gets better if you have a student ID which dovetails nicely with one of the reasons AWS credits might be needed in the first place. Once this happens and you follow advice from this thread and the thread I link to at the bottom of this post, you are set.
If for some reasons neither of the options is available to you, then post in this thread or PM me directly - I will do what I can to figure out a way to get you through this course.
Side Note: There is one other thing you could do to get the most utility out of your AWS credits / personal money - you can read my take on this in this post.
