Just wrote this behemoth of a reply, thought i would give it its own post. This will take forever to generate something worth having!
I had to guide a friend through setting up EC2 yesterday as he has a $500 voucher. Can confirm the following does work. cpuminer is getwork based, installing stratum proxy is recommended.
This also has my miner login details in. Don't change them and it is me not you who benefits!
Once you have an AWS account set up and working go.
I can also set this up for you for
BTC0.1 (You will need to set up an EC2 account and send me the .pem, your miner worker username and password, and the machine address). It may take months for the free miner to make you a return on that!
EC2 -> Launch Instance -> Ubuntu Server 12.10 ->T1.Micro (For Free) -> Continue -> Continue -> Continue ->
[Up to you if you want to give it a name ] -> Continue ->Create a new Key Pair and download it
-> Continue -> Default should do, if you go custom make sure to add a rule for ssh -> Launch
If you want to waste you're money the best instance for mining is CG1 (use Ubuntu Server 12.10 for Cluster Instances)
But you will need to set up the GPU drivers and a GPU miner. The best which you could still follow this is CC2 (Again Cluster OS). IT WILL COST MORE THAN YOU EARN! Side note, CC2 is a fairly cheap way of generating a vanity address (See my sig). You can ususally get a 6 character one in an hour if you're fast setting it up.
Give it a couple minutes to boot then you need to ssh in. Click the instance and under EC2... it will say something like
ec2-54-224-182-88.compute-1.amazonaws.com
If you can be assed to google it set up an elastic IP. If not -
If your on linux open a terminal and assuming you're key is saved in downloads and called myawskey
cd ~/Downloads/
chmod 400 myawskey.pem
ssh -i myawskey.pem ubuntu@ec2-54-224-182-88.compute-1.amazonaws.com
On windows you will need an ssh client like putty. Google it.
Once connected to the server these into the terminal one by one (waiting for each to complete before the next)
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
echo >> $HOME/.bash_profile
echo 'export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/tools/lib' >> $HOME/.bash_profile
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/tools/bin' >> $HOME/.bash_profile
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/tools/lib
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/tools/bin
cpus=$(cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep ^processor | wc -l)
sudo apt-get install build-essential libcurl4-gnutls-dev python-dev libjansson-dev autoconf automake git libtool
git clone git://github.com/yasm/yasm.git
cd yasm
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=$HOME/tools
make -j $cpus
make install
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/jgarzik/cpuminer.git
cd cpuminer
./autogen.sh
./configure
make -j $cpus
screen -d -m ./minerd --threads $cpus --algo sse2_64 --url http://api.bitcoin.cz:8332 --userpass hectorgrebbell.bitcointalk:password
To see what its doing type
screen -r
To close the connection but leave it running
[If the screen is showing] Hold Ctrl, press A then D
exit
