Motivation

Recently I got some free aws credits, So I was just wondering if I can it for Etherium mining on AWS. And Eventually I was able to successfully mine some good amount of etherium. Cost wise its not at all efficient but here it goes just in case you are interested

Assumptions

• You understand how EC2 works in AWS, especially things like spot machines and spot-fleet.
• You understand basic Linux commands.

Steps to etherium mining:

• There is no point of mining with CPU because hashrate will be terrible, so we will focus on two types of machines: g2.2xlarge($0.16/hr), p2.xlarge($0.18/hr), pricing which is mentioned is spot pricing, which this will be taken back aws if your bid is lower than current ongoing bid.
• Okay so first launch a machine with image ami-cb384fdd in N.Virginia region.
• Once machine is launched ssh into the machine
• You can any mining pool, I used dwarfpool.
• Run this command: nohup ethminer -G -F http://eth-eu.dwarfpool.com/${YOUR_ETH_ADDREES} &
• Mining should start now.

Results

I got below hashrates:

• g2.2xlarge : 7 MH/s
• p2.xlarge : 10 MH/s

How much did I make:

For 10 Hrs with 10 machines, which generated 124 MH/s, I make something like 3$. Total aws cost was approx 18$. So like I said before, mining on aws is not economical.

I will be writing a part 2 to this, how can setup spot fleet, that will just keep on mining etherium, even if machine is stopped by aws, as soon as you get the replace you should be able to mine again without human intervention.