The rate can fluctuate between 1:1 and 1:4, i.e. in the best case you'll get almost 1$ worth of cryptocurrency for every 1$ spent on azure (depending on the current exchange-rates). This is possible because the newly introduced Azure-batch-service has a low-priority-option, which is dirt cheap!
Short summary:Do you have a MSDN-subscription from you day job?
Great! You must have already noticed that Microsoft keeps sending you
emails asking you to open an azure-account with up to 150$ monthly
credit. Follow the instructions in the mail to claim your free
credits. Note that by default you don't even have to enter
your credit-card-number, so you can be sure that your mining is
running purely on your monthly free credit.
If you don't have a MSDN-subscription, you can at least use the one-time
credit of 200$ you get just for opening the Azure-account.
Depending on the current exchange-rate and whether azure adds tax to
you bill or not it might even be profitable to keep running your
azure-account on your credit-card - but note that you'll be operating
on a razor-thin margin!
With the scripts provided on this site you can setup your azure-servers to mine with the cryptonight-algorithm. The cryptonight-algorithm can be efficiently run on standard server hardware, special ASICs or GPUs are not required (the algorithm was intentionally designed that way). The cryptocurrency Monero is based on this algorithm, and it is better than bitcoin in virtually every aspect (i guess bitcoin beats Monero only in popularity...). You could mine directly to a Monero-pool, but there are several other cryptocurrencies based on cryptonight available as well. When choosing a pool, pay attention to the pool's rules:
It's good practice to setup a secondary pool, in case the primary pool is offline. Personally i use Nicehash as a primary mining-pool and the Monero mining-pool xmrpool.eu as a secondary mining-pool.
On whattomine.com you can see the estimated daily income when mining with 16 cores (app. yield: 700H/s) in the azure cloud. In my experience Nicehash always had the best or second-best profitability → look at the "Nicehash-CryptoNight"-entry. It might not sound like much at first, but once you set it up it's free money :-)
Note: Cryptocurrencies are notorious for being targets of spectacular hacks - even Nicehash.com was hacked once. The more cryptocurrency you accumulate, the more important it is to educate yourself about the possible security threats!
Note: Azure calls a group of virtual machines within the batch-service a 'Pool'. This has nothing to do with the term 'mining-pool' (operated by e.g. xmrpool.eu). Don't confuse the two terms.
After signing up for your azure-account you can click on the
following link to create a new batch-account: https://portal.azure.com/#create/Microsoft.BatchAccount
Fill the form with following information:
Once you get the notification that your batch-account has been
created (it will take a few seconds), go to your batch-account and create
a new pool: select 'Pools' and then click
'Add'. Fill the form with the following information:
This is your personalized script:
(Note that the scripts and the miner-executable are hosted on github.com - you can check out the code yourself if you have any doubts about the function of the script)
Once the azure-pool is created, go to 'Start task'.
Fill the form with the following information:
The last step is to tell Azure how many mining-nodes it should start for you. This depends on the amount of free credits available in your azure-account. Basically you want to use up as much of your monthly credit as possible without actually consuming all of your credit (otherwise you'll have to repeat the setup again in the next month because azure will delete your pools if your free credits are exhausted).
Professional | Platform | Enterprise | |
Number of low priority nodes (F2, 2 Cores, 4GB) | 3 |
6 |
10 |
Total number of active cores | 6 | 12 | 20 |
Cost of nodes for 31 days | ~45$ | ~90$ | ~149$ |
Monthly free credit | 50$ | 100$ | 150$ |
If azure is setup to use your local currency instead of USD the numbers might look slightly different.. if you run out of free credit before the end of the month, just reduce the number of nodes by one and try again.
Now go back to 'Overview' and click on 'Scale'. Enter the number from the table above in the field 'Low priority nodes' (e.g. 3 if you have MSDN Professional), and click on 'Save'. Congratulations! The azure cloud is now mining cryptocurrency for you!
If you have MSDN Enterprise you can also setup two azure-pools: One pool with a single F16-Node to mine to Nicehash, and a second pool with two F2-Nodes mining to xmrpool.eu (this will result in a total of 20 active cores).
To stop your azure-pool, go to the overview-page of the azure-pool, select 'Scale' and enter '0' as the number of 'Low priority nodes'. Then click 'Save'. Note that by default your azure-pool will automatically stop when your free credits are exhausted. You can simply restart your azure-pool in the next month once your free credits have been refilled.If you are using a mining-pool like xmrpool.eu you can see your mining-status if you go to the pool's homepage (e.g. xmrpool.eu) and enter your wallet.
Do you need help following the instructions? You can contact me at