I didn't see any posts on this, has anyone else tried this out for fun?
I ran out my free credit with HP Cloud and AWS and decided to try Windows Azure. The prices fluctuate but you get $200 free credit and can get 20 cores going for about 100 hours at no cost.
I am getting about 4 khash/s for each core so 80 khash/s isn't bad for free and taking 15 minutes to set it up.
Once you're signed up, info on creating your VMs is here:
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/linux/tutorials/virtual-machine-from-gallery/Use two 8 core Ubuntu 13.10 instances and one 4 core to get all 20 going.
Connect to each instance and run the below and you're ready to go.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential libcurl4-openssl-dev
wget
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpuminer/files/pooler-cpuminer-2.3.2-linux-x86_64.tar.gztar xzf pooler*
./minerd --url=stratum+tcp://myminingpool.com:3333 --userpass=my.worker:password