Overview

SSH Keys are used to establish secure client-server connections via SSH (shell acces) to running instances in the cloud. An SSH Key pair consists of both public and private material. EC2 SSH Keys are also region-specific. When you launch an EC2 instance, you must use an SSH Key that's located in the same region as where you're going to launch the instance.

Create a unique SSH Key (secure shell) so that you can SSH directly into a machine. The SSH key is passed directly into an instance in order to provide root login access to the machine via SSH. Once an instance is launched, you can typically find it inserted into /root/.ssh/authorized_keys.

For security reasons, when an SSH Key is created, Amazon will only send the key material of the SSH Key to the user once. Therefore, SSH Keys that are generated inside the Dashboard will have key material, whereas SSH Keys generated outside of RightScale will not have any key material. However, you can manually add the key material for one of your SSH keys inside the Dashboard. The Dashboard will always display all SSH Keys associated with an account, regardless of whether or not they have key material. You can still launch an instance inside the Dashboard using an SSH key that does not have any key material, but you will not be able to SSH into the instance or use any of RightScale's convenient features such as bundling, backups, automation, etc. Without knowing the contents of the SSH Keys, RightScale will not be able to access your instance to perform such tasks.

The Key Fingerprint is the public key fingerprint. It is shorter than the private key, and is used to authenticate or lookup the longer private key. Key Material refers to the encrypted portion of the private key. For security reasons, the private key material is only visible in the RightScale Dashboard to the user who created the SSH Key and users with 'admin' user role privileges. Since Amazon will only send you the private key material once when you create an SSH Key, it's important that you create your SSH Keys from the RightScale Dashboard/API, otherwise RightScale will not be able to capture the private key material. Without key material, you will not be able to SSH into an instance if it's using v4 RightImages. If you've created SSH keys outside of RightScale, they will appear in the list below and you'll be able to assign them to an instance at launch time. However, since RightScale does not have its private key material, you will not be able to SSH into the instance from the RightScale Dashboard. To solve this problem, simply edit the key and manually add its key material.

RightScale's Managed SSH feature will be used to establish SSH access and RightLink will be used to run RightScripts on the instance. You can either use the unique SSH Key that RightScale generates for each user or upload your own SSH Key.

Action Buttons

The following action buttons are available on the SSH Keys page:

  • New - Create a new SSH Key pair where Amazon will generate the key pair for you.
  • Import - Create a new SSH Key pair by using an existing RSA key pair.

Actions

Further Reading