SSH into EC2 Instance whose key pair is lost

Lab Details

This lab will guide you through steps to SSH into an EC2 Instance whose key pair is lost.

To log in to your instance, you will use key pairs and practice using Amazon Machine Images. Create a temporary instance with the new key pair. Next, transfer the key pair data from the first instance to this instance. Finally, SSH into the instance using the instance's key pairing.

Duration: 90 minutes

AWS Region: US East, N. Virginia us-east-1

Introduction

What is EC2 exactly?

AWS refers to it as Elastic Compute cloud.

You can rent a virtual environment to create your own environment, and it's free.

These virtual machines are known as Instances by Amazon.

You can use pre-configured templates to launch instances. These templates are known as images. These images are available from Amazon in the form AMIs (Amazon Machine Images).

This allows you to create custom applications and services.

It is simple to scale infrastructure, i.e. up or down depending on your demand.

AWS offers multiple configurations of storage, CPU, memory, and other options. You can choose the flavor that is best for you.

Amazon EC2 Keypair

Key Pair is composed of a private and public key. These are security credentials that prove identity when connecting to an instance. The public key is stored by Amazon EC2 and the private key is kept by you. You will no longer need a password to access the instance. Instead, you'll use a private key. Private key security belongs to the customer. He/she must be careful when handling the private key security.

Case Study

ABC Corporation is a new software company to AWS. They had created a PoC server group and had assigned a Key pair for login to the servers. They are still new and lost their key pair file due to unknown reasons. They are scheduled to visit a customer and will need to show the PoC. How do they get to the server so that the PoC can be presented? There are many ways to resolve this issue. This lab is one of them.