How to connect to an Amazon Elastic Cloud 2 (EC2) instance with SSH from windows?

If you have created an Amazon EC2 instance and are not being able to access it through SSH, dominant chance is that you have not configured a key-pair with your EC2 instance.

Following steps elaborate how to create and a key-pair with your EC2 instance:

1. Goto EC2 tab, create a key-pair.
2. Download key-pair and save it at a place from where you can easily access it.
3. Create an EC2 instance with current key-pair. If you have already created an EC2 instance, you will need to terminate it and create a new one.
4. Convert key-pair to private key using puttygen. This will generate a ppk file.
5. Use putty ( or any secure shell app ) with your ppk file.