Mining Ethereum on AWS — the complete guide (2024)

The AWS Ethereum Miner project has been around for over a year now and has seen a great interest from the miners during this time. With the looming end of Ethereum mining — aka ETH 2.0 or “the merge” (see below) — it no longer makes sense to invest in buying GPUs and mining rigs. There simply isn’t enough time to pay them off.

AWS mining still offers an attractive alternative thanks to their no upfront payment pricing model. In this post I’ll guide you step by step on your journey to the cloud mining.

What is AWS Ethereum Miner

• Easy to use CloudFormation template that spins up the most cost effective EC2 instances and starts the mining program.
  TL;DR — Visit the project GitHub and scroll down for the table with 1-click deployment links: https://github.com/mludvig/aws-ethereum-miner
• Support for all relevant AWS GPU instances:
  - Standard Nvidia ones like g5.*, p3.*, g4dn.*
  - Superfast p4d.24xlarge that can mine at 1.35GH/s
  - AMD Radeon based g4ad.*
  - The new Graviton2 CPU + Nvidia GPU g5g.*
  Some old, slow instances are no longer supported, e.g. p2.* or g3.* as their performance is laughable.
• Optimised AMIs with the new CUDA 11.6 that are far smaller than the Amazon’s Deep Learning AMIs. The size of course matters, even though us males don’t like to hear it :)
  Mining is all about efficiency and paying for 150GB storage with lots of unneeded tools vs paying for a lean 10GB custom image makes a difference.

Overview of the mining process

1. The GPU instances, aka miners or workers, receive jobs from the Ethermine pool and submit the solutions (“shares”). The performance of each instance is calculated in MH/s (mega hashes per second).
2. The Ethermine pool keeps track of all the shares submitted by your workers. Each submitted share receives a small reward…