I wouldn't say it's for insiders but I certainly assume that the reader has some AWS experience and can at least create a CloudFormation stack from the template provided. This article is not an introduction to AWS or CloudFormation.

Regarding your questions: 1 - you don't need an account on ethermine.org, you simply use your wallet address, 2 - the "object" you're probably talking about is a Linux binary, you're not supposed to run it locally, 3-hashrates are reported on the etherminer dashboard and in the logs of the ethminer process on the EC2.