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This doesn't have anything to do with mining. It's about templates to provision your own private/permissioned blockchain network.

> The template supports Ethereum mining, the EthStats and EthExplorer status pages, ...

Literally the first use case mentioned.

Azure has this for a some time with Ethereum. Blockchain as a Service they call it. It's mostly for being able to test and develop things I assume, not for mining. But I'm still not fully understanding the value of these offerings. Ethereum does have multiple test networks already. One can develop in private, that seems the main advantage.

> So why does this official post exist?

It lets Sales send this article to people who write in asking "can I build my blockchain on AWS", which lets Amazon make some money off the craze.

I think the ability to mine is incidental here. This is more likely to be targeted at dapps developers by offering them an easy setup for both test and production environment.