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Comment by digitalsushi | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

> 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)

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.

Sometimes it does take significantly longer than 20secs.

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.

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.

You can just put it in an older vehicle that doesn’t care

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.

old gasoline works just fine as long as it is mixed with new stuff...

This “solution” defeats the very intend of GP proposal to not use it :-)

How about diesel?

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.

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