| If you know what Colab's definition of abusive or disallowed use is (or even whether they have such a definition), please let me know. This isn't meant as a gotcha -- I actually haven't been able to find a full TOS or anything like that, despite looking for one at the outset and then again while writing the linked post. If it exists I want to know. As I said in the post, the closest thing I can find is the FAQ at https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html (this may be what you're thinking of -- there is no "initial setup process," anyone logged in to a Google account can immediately connect to a runtime and execute notebook cells). It says the following: Why are hardware resources such as T4 GPUs not available to me? The best available hardware is prioritized for users who use Colaboratory interactively rather than for long-running computations. Users who use Colaboratory for long-running computations may be temporarily restricted in the type of hardware made available to them, and/or the duration that the hardware can be used for. We encourage users with high computational needs to use Colaboratory’s UI with a local runtime.
Please note that using Colaboratory for cryptocurrency mining is disallowed entirely, and may result in being banned from using Colab altogether. To me, this doesn't sound like "please don't use this wrong or too much, and we assume you know what 'wrong' and 'too much' mean here." Consider how this is written as an answer to a hypothetical user who has already been "temporarily restricted" and is looking for more info. They talk about this restriction non-judgmentally, like it's a practical limitation of their tool anyone might run into, not a moral line that "good" users will never cross anyway. (The part about cryptocurrency mining is different and perfectly understandable, given the distinctive moral and perhaps legal facts of that subject.) See also my post https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/190114849409/cloud-ca... for more thoughts on the subject. The screenshot there is from the 2017 conference talk https://gojko.net/2017/10/05/serverless-design-gotocph.html which happily discusses unintended but economically rational use of AWS products, like using IOT Gateway for non-IOT purposes where its pricing model is convenient. |
FWIW, whenever it takes you a long time to get something working, such as a constantly running Collab with a static IP or automatically updated link to it or DNS: that's a sign. Even more if, as in this case, what you are doing would be trivial to enable/make easier if Google wanted to.