How to mine Chia cryptocurrency on Amazon AWS cloud computing platform?

Technology giant Amazon has unveiled a solution designed to mine the Chia cryptocurrency on its AWS cloud computing platform.

According to a page on the Chinese Amazon AWS website, the platform says that to mine native cryptocurrency on the Chia XCH network, users can deploy a cloud storage system in just five minutes.

The page also includes a short guide on how to use cloud services to generate Chia wallet addresses and start profitable farming.

How to start mining Chia from Amazon?

Step 1.

Users are promised quick deployment of mining infrastructure - according to the instructions provided, connection takes only 5 minutes. To do this, the user must become an Amazon customer and then connect to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service, which provides computing power in the cloud. There you need to select the Amazon Linux 2 system and the i3.xlarge model. The memory size is set to 30 GB.

Step 2.

We create an instance partition on the disk.

sudo fdisk /dev/nvme0n1

Step 3.

We create a file system on the instance.

sudo mkfs -t xfs/dev/nvme0n1p1

Step 4.

Mounting the file system.

sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /tmp1

Step 5.

We modify the permissions for the ec2-user user.

sudo chown -R ec2-user.ec2-user /tmp1

Step 6.

We create a resource bucket in the AWS console, install the goofys program for mounting buckets and mount the file system through it.

wget https://github.com/kahing/goofys/releases/latest/download/goofys chmod u+x goofys mkdir /home/ec2-user/chia sudo ./goofys —uid 1000 —gid 1000 -o allow_other s3_bucket /home /ec2-user/chia

Step 7

Enter the command
df -h
to confirm access of the user ec2-user to the file systems /tmp1 and /home/ec2-user/chia
Step 8.
Install the Chia code.

sudo yum update -y sudo yum install python3 git -y git clone https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain.git -b latest --recurse-submodules cd chia-blockchain chmod +x ./install. sh sh install.sh . ./activate

Step 9

We install and execute the initialization command to create the wallet address.

chia init

Step 10

Create a wallet address.

chia keys generate

Alternatively you can enter chia keys add

and insert a mnemonic phrase.
Step 11.
Start the Chia process.

chia start farmer

Step 12

Mainim!

nohup chia plots create -k 32 -b 6000 -r 2 -n 2 -t /tmp1 -2 /tmp1 -d /home/ec2-user/chia >> plots1.log 2>&1 &

Step 13

Checking the mining status.

chia farm summary

Since this is a new service, users have not yet had time to evaluate the profitability of this mining option, but it is clearly more affordable than installing your own system. Additionally, AWS miners won't have to worry about the wear and tear that comes with mining cryptocurrencies and Chia in particular.

How to Manage the AWS Platform

Amazon Web Services is accessed and managed through the AWS Console , a site where you can manage resources through your browser. This is one way of interaction, but there are others:

• SDK is a way to programmatically interact with the platform. SDKs are implemented for such popular programming languages ​​as: C++, Go, Java, JS, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby. If the language you're coding in doesn't have an official SDK, there is probably a community-supported library. Or you can write your own SDK, which will be a kind of wrapper for the provided HTTP interface.
• AWS CLI is a command line utility that is convenient to use to automate processes. It is also suitable for those who are more comfortable using the command line rather than a graphical interface.

Interest in Chia is growing

It is unclear exactly when Amazon AWS began touting this solution, but it is another sign of the growing level of attention and interest in Chia mining from Chinese investors.

Last month, as Chinese retail investors showed interest in Chia mining, prices for various hard drive models in China rose, with some models increasing by more than 100%.

Even though there are plenty of hard drive spare parts available in the market, some dealers and wholesalers have been holding back their stock to push up prices.

Founded in 2022, Chia is a decentralized storage network that aims to use hard drives as computing power to replace Bitcoin's power-hungry Proof-of-Work mechanism.

The main network for mining went live on March 19, and over the past two months, the amount of storage used for mining on the network has grown to more than one exabyte, which is equivalent to the storage capacity of more than 1 million units of 1 TB hard drives.

Key Benefits of AWS

Does not require large investments

If you want to launch your startup and create a messenger, you will need:

• servers that will carry out communication;
• a server with a database that will store the message history,
• servers for storing files so users can share images with each other.

All this can cost quite a lot of money. However, you will not have any guarantees that the business will be successful and you will not lose what you invested.

Having bought a physical server and paid for it, you most likely will not use it around the clock and at full capacity. If you use a cloud platform, then your virtual machine will be able to share physical hardware with the virtual machines of other users. This ensures its lower cost.

With AWS, you can rent only the resources and capacity that you need right now, and pay for them hourly or by the number of requests completed.

If you notice that something is going wrong, you can simply shut down all the servers and resources that were involved. Thus, you do not risk losing huge investments.

Provides the largest infrastructure of any cloud provider

Today, the AWS infrastructure consists of 25 regions, each of which has several availability zones. This is one or more data centers.

AWS offers a variety of cloud services that you can use in combinations to suit your business and organizational needs.

You can easily turn off servers and resources you don't use

Pros of the Amazon FBA Program

Shipping and Returns Handled Well : A team of experts manages the process and you don't need to waste time on after-sales service. Amazon's logistics structure is simple and allows the seller to focus on other things such as marketing and customer interaction.

Affordable Shipping Rates : It's hard to find such discounted prices on other carriers. If your customers buy a lot of orders, they will likely be eligible for free shipping.

For expedited shipping, Prime members get exclusive two-day shipping, which seems like a huge plus for your business's future sales projections.

Amazon offers an omnichannel fulfillment program : This solution is all you need, especially if you want to fulfill orders directly from sales channels other than Amazon. The FBA shipping app for Shopify allows store owners on the channel to automate the fulfillment process without any new hassles.

Connecting to a Linux system via SSH

Once your instance is launched, you can connect to it and use it as you would the computer in front of you.

The following instructions explain how to connect to your instance using an SSH client. If you encounter an error when trying to connect to your instance, see Troubleshoot connecting to your instance. For additional connection options, see Connecting to a Linux Instance.

When you first launch an instance in AWS, you will be asked to select an access type - select paired-keys and save your private key ( .pem

) to the client computer.

Remember where you saved it. Let's say you saved the key to the /path/

Necessary preparations

Before connecting to a Linux system, please meet the following conditions.

Check the status of your instance

After starting the instance, it may take several minutes until the instance is ready for use and you can connect to it.

Make sure your instance passes the health check. You can view this information in the status check column on the instances page. Get the public DNS name and username to connect to your instance

topbicycle.awsapps.com/start#/ → Management Console → EC2 → Instances (all states) → Instance state → Wait until the status becomes Running

Get the public DNS name and username to connect to your instance

To find your instance's public DNS name or IP address and the username you must use to connect to your instance, see Connect to your instance prerequisites.

Install the SSH client on your local computer as needed

You may have a default SSH client installed on your local computer. You can check this by typing ssh on the command line. If your computer does not recognize this command, you can install an SSH client.

• The latest versions of Windows Server 2022 and Windows 10-OpenSSH are included as an installable feature. For more information, see OpenSSH on Windows
• Earlier versions of Windows - Download and install OpenSSH. For more information, see Win32-OpenSSH
• Linux and macOS X - Download and install OpenSSH. For more information see openssh.com

Mining Ethereum in 5 minutes

All you need to start mining on Ethereum is an AWS EC2 instance.

Surely, you have already heard something about cryptocurrencies that are rapidly gaining popularity.
Slowly but surely, cryptocurrencies are changing in their own way the usual process of financial systems and transactions (in my opinion, such systems should continue to work, assimilating with new trends). Not long ago, the value of Bitcoin reached $6,000, while the market capitalization of such a cryptocurrency today is $103 billion, as well as hundreds of ICOs (Initial coin offerings) conducted since August of this year. Needless to say, during this time there has been a huge economic boom in the world of Bitcoin, which, apparently, will not subside very soon. As you can see in the chart below, the total capitalization of cryptocurrencies has grown from $50 billion to $150 in just a year. Personally, I like the Ethereum project the most, in which it is quite easy to start mining using AWS. I want to devote this article to this very topic – mining.

Before we move on to the main topic, I suggest first getting acquainted with the basic concepts. If you already know about this platform and mining, then you can safely skip the introductory part.

What is Ethereum?

Ethereum is an open blockchain-based software platform that allows developers to build and deploy decentralized applications.
The main advantage of Ethereum over Bitcoin is that the former provides support for various types of decentralized applications. Ethereum ranks second after Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization. For example, in the past year alone, the value of the Ethereum platform has increased by 230%, as can be seen in the chart below:

However, an increase in price growth implies an increase in the requirements placed on miners who work on the Ethereum platform, which, in turn, certainly leads to an increase in the complexity of the mining process:

If it so happened that you started working with the Ethereum platform in May of this year, then you probably felt how much more difficult the mining process has become today.

What is crypto mining?

The word “mining” itself (from English mining – to mine) is a kind of analogue of gold mining in the field of cryptocurrency. In a nutshell: cryptocurrency mining is solving complex mathematical problems. Miners, in turn, are people who spend all their time and energy solving such problems. Miners provide their solutions to those who confirm such decisions. After which the miners receive a well-deserved reward - a block of Ether. As you might have guessed, the more complex the mining process, the more complex the mathematical problems that need to be solved become, and the more difficult it is to get a reward for the solutions found. At the moment, due to the extraordinary popularity and demand of Ethereum, the difficulty of mining for this platform also reaches its maximum.

Is it worth mining on Ethereum at all?

It just so happens that the more miners join Ethereum, the more difficult it becomes to solve problems and the mining process itself.
Then you ask: “Well, should I even start mining if the time for a good start has already been lost?” You should know that the value of the platform is constantly increasing, so the value of its currency, even if it is a small amount, can grow to colossal amounts in the future. However, some changes have occurred in Ethereum: not so long ago, a proof-of-stake method was introduced for this platform. This means that the mining process will no longer mean much. However, such innovations could lead to a sharp increase in the value of the Ethereum cryptocurrency.

So, if you have already rethought all the information above and are still ready to start mining on Ethereum, then the rest of the article is just for you!

How to launch your own AWS mining instance?

Just a few simple steps:

1. Go to your AWS EC2 console and change your region to US East (N.Virginia)
   . This district has the lowest cost for the services we need and, in addition, there is an AMI community in which we can find the installed mining libraries we need.
2. In the Instances column, select Spot Instances and click Request Spot Instances.
3. Find the AMI community called ami-cb384fdd
   and choose it.
4. Under Instance, select g2.8xlarge
   .
5. Launch!

Start of mining

In order to start mining, you need your own Ethereum wallet, and you must also be part of the miner pool.
To create your wallet, go to www.myetherwallet.com and follow the instructions provided. Upon completion of the registration process, you will receive your personal wallet address. For mining we will use the Dwarfpool pool. However, you can use any other pool. Here you can find a list of the most popular ones.

Just use the SSH protocol for this purpose and enter the following code:

> tmux > ethminer -G -F https://eth-eu.dwarfpool.com/{WALLET ADDRESS}/{YOUR_EMAIL ADDRESS} —cl-local-work 256 —cl-global-work 16384 With Tmux you can continue to execute all necessary processes even after the SSH connection is completed.

Ethminer is a GPU miner. Enter your email to receive notifications about payments made on the platform. Other parameters are provided to optimize the mining process.

That's all!


The DAG file will soon be created and immediately after that you can start mining.

My opinion is this: due to its excessive complexity, the Ethereum mining process is not worth the candle if you decide to do it just now. For example, one hour of work with g2.8xlarge will cost you 2.6 dollars, while the profit of a miner in Ethereum can also be only 2.6 dollars per day!

Now no one can tell you for sure what the future holds for any of the current cryptocurrencies - maybe they will all burst like a soap bubble. There is also an opinion that selling cryptocurrency is a kind of lottery.

However, as an optimist, I am more than confident that cryptocurrencies have a bright future ahead, and the recent rapid development of Bitcoin and Ethereum only confirms my assumptions. We should also not forget that mining is like a lottery, so a unit of cryptocurrency earned today can skyrocket in price a hundred times in a year.

— #1 reddit promotion service

.

Is the Amazon FBA model worth it?

We ask this question a million times in our comments section. Selling on Amazon FBA is probably the best choice for any new seller on a budget.

Order fulfillment attracts a lot of attention when running an online business. Leaving this part to the experts gives you plenty of time to do things like product promotion and customer engagement.

Some of the initial benefits to the bank from the FBA business model include:

1. Optimized logistics funnel . Amazon speeds up the shipping process, giving your e-commerce business a competitive edge. For Amazon Prime subscribers, the two-day delivery period increases the likelihood of order fulfillment a notch above the typical threshold.
2. The e-commerce seller can take advantage of the shipping discount. . This unusual incentive helps significantly improve sales forecasts.
3. Huge opportunities to scale your e-commerce business . Amazon has more than 175 fulfillment centers around the world. And when you add up unlimited warehouse space, you realize that the retailer has no inventory limits. Additionally, there is no minimum quantity. You can also send one item.
4. Amazon offers omnichannel fulfillment for sellers who sell on other platforms. . If, say, you're selling Shopify or BigCommerce, you can automate order processing right from your store's dashboard. Once all integrations are in order, Amazon syncs inventory and automatically updates tracking status right in your online store.
5. The delivery speed is as it should be, quite competently . Not only this. You don't have to process returns along with their shipping labels. FBA's reverse logistics team understands this.

Device [edit | edit code]

The cloud is located in several geographically dispersed data processing centers, combined into groups based on geographic proximity, called “regions”; within the region, several “availability zones” are implemented within which high availability of hosted services is ensured; as of 2022, there are 60 availability zones in 20 regions. Subscribers can choose a region and availability zone, and are also given the ability to organize data replication and application migration between availability zones.

The largest region is Northern Virginia (6 accessibility zones), and the Ohio zone also operates in the eastern United States; in the western United States there are two regions (Northern California and Oregon, 3 accessibility zones each). There are 5 regions in Western Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Stockholm, all with 3 availability zones), 5 regions in the Asia-Pacific region (four-zone in Tokyo, three-zone in Sydney and Singapore, two-zone in Seoul and Mumbai, local single-zone in Osaka), 2 regions in China (three-zone in Ningxia and two-zone in Beijing), as well as a two-zone region in Canada and a three-zone region in Sao Paulo. A separate pair of regions - the so-called GovCloud - are three-zone regions in the West and East of the United States, intended only for subscribers from the American public sector.

Infrastructure services [ edit | edit code]

A key infrastructure service is the EC2 virtual server rental service. Subscribers are provided with virtual machines running on the Xen hypervisor (the transition to its own version of KVM has been announced), a choice of machines with different computing power is available, as well as machines with access to specialized equipment (video cards for GPGPU, programmable gate arrays). EC2 is tightly integrated with other cloud infrastructure services, most notably Elastic File System, which provides a file system attached to virtual machines, Elastic Block Store (EBS), which provides volumes attached to virtual machines as block devices, and S3, which provides cloud file storage. large volume storage.

Other infrastructure services include Route 53 (managed cloud DNS), VPC (a means of creating a group of cloud services within an isolated VPN), Elastic Load Balancing (traffic balancer between virtual machines), the Glacier service provides long-term (“cold”) data storage, and CloudFront is a content delivery network. A number of services provide automated management of infrastructure hosted on AWS, including CloudFormation, OpsWorks, CloudWatch.

Connecting to a Linux system

Connect to the Linux instances you have launched and transfer files between your local machine and your instance.

For information about connecting to a Windows instance, see Connecting to a Windows Instance in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Windows Instances.

Connection settings

Your local computer's operating system determines the connection options from your local computer to your Linux instance.

If your local computer operating system is Linux or macOS X

• SSH client
• Connecting an EC2 instance
• AWS Systems Manager Session Manager

If your local computer is running Windows operating system

• PyTTY
• SSH client
• AWS Systems Manager Session Manager
• Windows Subsystem for Linux

Self-study materials

There are several ways to explore AWS capabilities. You can use white papers, manuals, online courses, and videos. From personal experience, I will say that preparing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification helped me get to know the platform quite well. Therefore, I advise you to pay attention to this course, even if you are not going to undergo certification in the near future. The course is an overview and will help you learn the core components of AWS and prepare to test for the AWS Solution Architect role in the future.

Also, among other sources for training, I recommend ADV-IT - a YouTube channel where both beginners and experienced developers will find information about AWS services, the main ways to interact with the platform, as well as cloud computing infrastructure.

And in general, you will find all useful materials on the official Amazon Web Services website. Good luck!

Scenario #3. PaaS. Digitalization, Machine Learning, Data Science

Digital transformation has become the main focus of large and successful companies. Those who have encountered it are well aware that it is often associated with the processing of large volumes of data, which means it requires large-scale computing power. At the same time, the launch of innovative products occurs under conditions of uncertainty. It is not known in advance what kind of result we will get, how many users it will cover and how many computing resources will be required to prepare and launch it.

In such conditions, purchasing expensive and powerful servers is often unprofitable; it is much more efficient to rent them. This is due to the fact that a successful digital model is always the result of searching and testing different ideas. In this regard, it is more profitable to pay for cloud services not constantly, but specifically during those limited periods of time when you need to check the functionality of the model, launch it, and it is also important to be able to refuse it at any time and turn off virtual machines. The pay-as-you-go payment system allows you to pay for resources upon use. Due to this, in an unstable market situation, savings on cloud services are very noticeable.

Statistically, more than 80% of deep learning projects in the cloud are carried out in AWS. This is because their implementation is usually easiest to implement through open source solutions, of which AWS provides the richest library.

This makes it possible to experiment with Machine Learning projects, test them and quickly launch them into a production environment, where they begin to work on real volumes of data, which AWS also successfully copes with.

For preparing machine learning projects, AWS offers a turnkey solution, Sage Maker. It allows you to automate routine operations and reduce the cost of computing resources by up to 45%. Savings occur due to the fact that the service monitors the cheapest resources currently available, and also controls that virtual machines are turned off instantly, without wasting extra minutes of expensive resource time. These capabilities become valuable for companies that are planning or beginning to develop machine learning services.

Cases

For digitalization and Machine Learning projects, AWS uses:

• PrivatBank is a biometric system for paying for purchases based on FaceID based on Amazon Rekognition.
• Barclays, a British financial conglomerate, uses a platform for finding insights from external datasets: a Spark cluster with on-demand performance growth, as well as cloud storage and databases for quickly working with growing volumes of data.
• Fannie Mae, the largest American mortgage agency, scaled the ML project into production: it automated and optimized the training of ML solutions using TensorFlow, and established on-the-fly processing of 40,000 reports (0.5M images) per day.
• Moody's, an international rating agency, built a prototype for predicting credit ratings in just 1 month.

When to choose AWS?

Amazon Web Services is the best option for companies that cannot predict the capacity needed when launching new projects or expanding existing ones. Software developers cannot find a platform that is better integrated with all existing development environments and tools. When it comes to digital transformation, AWS provides both the lowest-cost computing power and ready-to-use tools that can streamline processes and reduce time to implement machine learning and artificial intelligence projects.