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How to Turn Your Azure Free Credits into Cryptocurrency: Detailed Instructions

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:

Setup Azure with Free Credit

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!

Setup Nicehash.com account (or choose other cryptonight-pool)

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:

The alternative is to mine to a pool run by Nicehash.com (i recommend mining with Nicehash only if you have MSDN Enterprise). With Nicehash.com you are basically always mining the most profitable altcoin and you get paid in bitcoin (read their documentation to learn how it works internally). If you are using Nicehash.com you'll get a special internal wallet, which you can only use with Nicehash.com pools. You can sign up for a free account at Nicehash.com/register.

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!

Setup the Azure Batch-Service

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:

In order to make the nodes actually do something, you'll need a startup script which downloads the mining-executable and starts mining. You can create your personalized script here by filling out the fields:

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.

Watching your Mining-Progress

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.

If you are mining with Nicehash.com you have to login and go to the dashboard to see the statistics. The Nicehash-servers use a very high difficulty-setting. This means:

Important Notes:


Do you need help following the instructions? You can contact me at