I am trying to remote into my EC2 instance's public IP address. Almost all of the documentation I have read to do this requires using either a .pem or .ppk file. Is there any way to connect to an instance using an access key id and secret access key?

CodePudding user response：

There are 3 ways to login to an Amazon EC2 Linux instance:

SSH

When the Amazon EC2 instance is launched, select a keypair that is already loaded into AWS. When the instance launches, the public half of the keypair will be copied into the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file for the ec2-user.

You can then login to the instance using the private keypair:

ssh -i keypair.pem [email protected]

EC2 Instance Connect

EC2 Instance Connect has two features:

• The ability to push a 'temporary keypair' to the EC2 instance
• The ability to establish an SSH connection via a web browser

Permission can be granted to an IAM User to use EC2 Instance Connect. Therefore, a user can login to the EC2 instance by using their AWS credentials. They are effectively requesting a connect via EC2 Instance Connect, and all the SSH stuff is done in the background.

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager

Amazon EC2 instances launched with Amazon Linux have an SSM Agent installed. This agent 'calls back' to AWS and offers the ability to use Session Manager to login to the instance. This isn't an SSH connection -- rather, it is a connection to the Agent, which runs commands in an interactive session.

Session Manager offers the ability to connect to instances in private subnets because the Agent is creating an outbound connection to AWS. (The other two methods above cannot be used to connect to an instance in a private subnet).

The ability to use Session Manager is based on permissions of the IAM User.