1.  Launch a new Linux Instance as described at http://www.newvem.com/amazon-aws-cloud-support/ec2-how-to-create-stop-or-terminate-an-instance.

We want to launch a Linux instance. I have selected AWS US West (Oregon) region. I will be using AMI ID : ami-46da5576.

2.  Ensure that you have opened the SSH port 22 for connecting to Linux. (Currently I have opened it for all IPs but this is not recommended practice. I recommend opening RDP port for a specific IP address only.)

3.  Verify your launch details.

For the purpose of this example I am using my key-pair (myfirstKey), which was created as described in “Create New Keypair for EC2 Instance”.

4.  Once you confirm the details, it will launch the instance and will display it in the console as shown below. Make note of the public DNS of the instance. (e.g. ec2-50-112-196-235.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com).

Once the instance is launched, we need to connect to it.  We will use PuTTy and the PuTTygen tools to connect to the Linux instance using the public DNS of the instance.
Both these tools can be downloaded from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html.

We are connecting from a Windows machine, therefore the key-pair file myfirstKey.pem needs to be converted to .ppk file.  We will use PuTTygen tool to perform the conversion.

5.  Open the PuTTygen tool.

6.  Click the Load button and select the myfirstKey.pem and load it in PuTTygen.

7.  Select Save Private Key and save the file as myfirstKey.ppk.

8.  When prompted, click OK to confirm that you want to save the key.

You now  have a key-pair private key in .ppk format.

9.  Start PuTTy by running putty.exe. Enter the public DNS you got in step #4 in the Host name/IP address field. Keep the port as 22.

10. In the Category tree, select SSH >Auth  and  then provide the key-pair file we used in launching the  instance to connect to the instance.

11. Click  Open.  The command window (telnet) is launched to connect to the AWS instance.

12.  Click Yes.  You are prompted to log in.

13.  For  an AWS Linux instance, enter ec2-user as the username. (Based on your operating system, the username might be different.)

If you have given the correct IP address, the Linux prompt is displayed as shown above.

 Now you can install and manage your application on the server as required.

Keywords: Amazon AWS Cloud, EC2, Putty, AWS Console, AWS linux instance, Keypair,