USING PUTTY TO CONNECT TO AWS EC2
Anshuman Biswas
PUTTY
PuTTY [1] is an SSH client emulator for the Windows OS.
PuTTY is a free and open-source.
It has been tested in Windows 7 and Windows 8.
Some of the features offered by PuTTY are:
 Graphical SSH Client
 Graphical SFTP file transfer
 Single-click Remote Desktop tunneling
 Auto-reconnecting capability
[1] http://www.putty.org/
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USING PUTTY TO CONNECT TO AWS EC2 (Part 1)
This tutorial provides a mechanism to allow the PuTTY client to connect to AWS EC2.
This tutorial may be found on AWS EC2 guide given below:
 http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/putty.html
These are the requirements to get putty working:
 Download and install PuTTY from the PuTTY download page [2]. Install the file named:
 putty-0.63-installer.exe
 Get the Public DNS of the EC2 instance.
 Locate the private key “pem” file that you downloaded when you created the EC2 instance.
 Enable inbound SSH traffic from your IP address to your instance. This should already be done if you
followed the tutorial on AWS.
[2] http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
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USING PUTTY TO CONNECT TO AWS EC2 (Part 2)
Putty does not support the “pem” file provided by Amazon. It will need to be
converted to a “ppk” file.
To convert your private key
 Start PuTTYgen (for example, from the Start menu, click All Programs > PuTTY > PuTTYgen).
 Under Type of key to generate, select SSH-2 RSA.
 Click Load. By default, PuTTYgen displays only files with the extension .ppk. To locate your .pem file,
select the option to display files of all types.
 Select your .pem file and click Open. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog box.
 Click Save private key to save the key in the format that PuTTY can use. PuTTYgen displays a warning
about saving the key without a passphrase. Click No.
 Specify the same name for the key that you used for the key pair (for example, sysc). PuTTY
automatically adds the .ppk file extension.
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USING PUTTY TO CONNECT TO AWS EC2 (Part 3)
The last step is to start the PuTTY SSH Session:
Start PuTTY (from the Start menu, click All Programs > PuTTY > PuTTY).
In the Category pane, select Session and complete the following fields:
In the Host Name box, enter ec2-user@public_dns_name.
Under Connection type, select SSH, ensure that Port is 22.
In the Category pane, expand Connection, expand SSH, and then select Auth. Then
perform the following actions:
 Click Browse.
 Select the .ppk file that you generated for your key pair, and then click Open.
 Click Open to start the PuTTY session.
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