Hi Tech Beauties,
In this cloudy post I will go over how to connect to a Linux AWS EC2 Instance using PuTTY, which is an ssh client. An SSH client is a program that allows establishing secure and authenticated SSH connections to SSH servers. According to www.ssh.com “Practically every Unix and Linux system includes the ssh command.” You can read more about it here.
STEP01- In order to connect to an AWS EC2 instance, you need to have an active AWS account and a running EC2 instance as well as an ssh client installed.
- If you do not have an AWS Account, you can create one by following the steps I used to create my account here.
- If you do not have a running EC2 instance available that you can connect to, you can launch one by following the steps linked here. It is important to have the ppk or pem file.
- You need to have an ssh client installed. You can download putty for a windows PC by clicking this link.
STEP02- I need to get the IPv4 address of the EC2 Instance
I am able to view the available running instances by going to the EC2 Dashboard and clicking Instances (Running). https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/
After clicking the checkbox next to the instance name I can see the public IPv4 DNS information
STEP04- I opened up PuTTY on my Windows PC and enter the details to connect to the EC2 Instance
I enter the Host Name by using the Public IPv4 DNS information from the EC2 Instance Details page in the format
instance-user-name@instance-public-dns-name
(ec2-user is the default instance user name that is available from AWS for Red hat instances. More details can be found here as provided by AWS)
I then clicked Connection → SSH → Auth
In the Private key file for authentication, I browsed for the ApacheWebServer.ppk that I downloaded when I launched my EC2 Instance.
I clicked Accept on the Security Alert and I have successfully connected to my AWS Linux EC2 Instance
Thank you again for joining me on this mini cloud journey connecting to a Linux AWS EC2 Instance! Hope you have a cloudier day! See you next time when I install Apache on this virtual host!
Sidra Javed (MSc, DIT 2023, ITILv3)
Cloud Engineer | DevOps Engineer | SRE | Production Application Support
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