How to SSH into EC2 Instances (AWS)

November 26, 2017Leron AminComments Open

With most cloud platforms, such as Google Cloud (GCP) or Microsoft Cloud (Azure), an SSH client is built-in. However, AWS does not include a built-in SSH client, and therefore requires you to use a third-party client in order to SSH into your EC2 instances.

In this tutorial you will learn how use a third-party SSH client (known as PuTTY) in order to SSH into your AWS EC2 instances.

Managing your AWS website’s files requires you to SSH into your EC2 instance. This can be achieved by using an SSH client such as PuTTY.

If you prefer to use a cloud platform with a built-in SSH client, check out the Google Cloud (GCP) or Microsoft Cloud (Azure) tutorials.

Before getting started with this tutorial, you should have already deployed an EC2 instance such as WordPress on Amazon AWS EC2.

There are 4 steps in this tutorial:

1. Download PuTTY
2. Convert SSH Key File
3. Copy DNS IP Address
4. Configure PuTTY

ssh into aws ec2 — PuTTY is the application that you will use to SSH into your AWS EC2 instance. You can download it for free here.

ssh into ec2 instance — After downloading PuTTY, open the PuTTY Key Generator application (PuTTYgen), and click the Load button to upload the key file that you downloaded in the previous step.

Don’t know your username?

• For an Amazon Linux AMI, the user name is ec2-user.
• For a RHEL AMI, the user name is ec2-user or root.
• For an Ubuntu AMI, the user name is ubuntu or root.
• For a Centos AMI, the user name is centos.
• For a Fedora AMI, the user name is ec2-user.
• For SUSE, the user name is ec2-user or root.

If ec2-user and root don’t work, check with the AMI provider.
Source: Amazon AWS User Guide

From this point forward, you’ll be able to quickly SSH into your EC2 instance simply by loading your instance’s saved Public IP address from the PuTTY dashboard.

If you have any questions or comments about this tutorial, be sure to post them below!

Thanks,