Key Pairs

Hello Everyone

Welcome to CloudAffaire and this is Debjeet

In the last blog post, we have discussed how to create a Placement Group and place instances under it.

https://cloudaffaire.com/create-a-placement-group-and-place-instances-under-it/

In this blog post, we are going to discuss Key Pairs and create a new Key Pair.

Key Pairs

Amazon EC2 uses public–key cryptography to encrypt and decrypt login information. Public–key cryptography uses a public key to encrypt a piece of data, such as a password, then the recipient uses the private key to decrypt the data. The public and private keys are known as a key pair.

When we create a key pair, AWS provides you the private key and keeps the public key. To log in to your instance, you must create a key pair, specify the name of the key pair when you launch the instance and provide the private key when you connect to the instance.

On a Linux instance, the public key content is placed in an entry within ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. This is done at boot time and enables you to securely access your instance using the private key instead of a password.

On a Windows instance, you use the private key to obtain the administrator password and then log in using RDP.

Create a Key Pairs

Below is the prerequisite for this demo

One active AWS account

Step 1: Login to AWS console and click ‘EC2’ under compute

Step 2: Navigate to ‘Key Pairs’ located under NETWORK & SECURITY and click ‘Create Key Pair’

Step 3: Provide a name and click ‘Create’

Private Key will be downloaded once you click ‘Create’. Please store it to a safe location as without the private key you will not be able to connect to your instance.

Our Key Pair has been successfully created. We can choose this new key pair during instance launch.

Hope you have enjoyed this blog post. In the next blog, we are going to discuss network interfaces.