Amazon ec2 for Newbies

I have to share this. I have just started getting familiar with the Amazon EC2 product offering. And there is a lot to take in. So the first major hurtle I encountered, and found little in the way of clear documentation for, was sshing i my new instance.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/GettingStartedGuide/

This link helps. The tests are less then clear, and it would help to have context for what each step is doing, but it works.

Please note the ec2-user@ requirement for setting the ssh user for the public key. Without this, putty will attempt to login using 'root'. No love. Amazon gives a nice, but short message telling you to login as the EC2 user account. I search through the console looking for where this was defined for my account. Seems it is generic, so use 'ec2-user'.

You can either add this to the domain value in the putty session, or into the 'Auto-Login Username' setting for the putty session. Look for this value on the Connection > Data page.