Connect to your EC2 instance - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Connect to your EC2 instance

Your Amazon EC2 instance is a virtual server in the Amazon Web Services Cloud. To log on to your instance, you must establish a connection to the instance. How you connect to your instance depends on the operating system of the instance and the operating system on the computer that you use to connect to the instance. The following table details the requirements for each connection method.

Connection option Instance operating system Inbound traffic rule IAM permissions Instance profile role Software on instance Software on connecting system Key pair

SSH client

Linux

Yes

No

No

No

Yes

Yes

EC2 instance connect

Linux

Yes

Yes

No

Yes ¹

No

No

PuTTY

Linux

Yes

No

No

No

Yes

Yes

RDP client

Windows

Yes

No

No

No

Yes

Yes ²

Fleet Manager

Windows

No

Yes

Yes

Yes ¹

No

Yes

Session Manager

Linux, Windows

No

Yes

Yes

Yes ¹

No

No

EC2 instance connect endpoint

Linux, Windows

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

Yes

¹ The required software is only pre-installed on certain AMIs. You can manually install the required software as needed on supported operating systems.

² The key pair is only required if you are using the randomly generated password for the local Administrator user account.

For more information, see the documentation for the connection option that you intend to use.