Using the same Keypair across AWS Regions

In one of the previous blog (1), we looked what happens behind the scenes when we use a Keypair for authentications against Linux. This blog post is more about productivity. I do create and connect to EC2 instances quite often and so I have created Sessions in Putty for most of my regularly connected Linux instances. One of the Session is for AWS which automatically populates the username and the keypair as shown below. When I would like to connect to an EC2 instance all I need to specify the Public IP address of the EC2 instance.

It all looks fine and dandy, the only problem is when I create EC2 instances in different AWS regions to test High Availability or some other features and try to connect to them. With the above approach since the Keypairs have regional scope, when I connect to EC2 instances in different regions, I need to change the keypairs in Putty. It would be good to use the same Keypair across regions, this way I don't need to change when connecting to the EC2 in different regions when using Putty saved sessions feature. Let's look at how to.

Step 1: Download putty.exe and puttygen.exe from here (1). There is no need to install it, just downloading should be good enough.

Step 2: Go to the EC2 Management Console and create a Keypair. Generate the Keypair by selecting the pem or ppk format. 

Step 3: When prompted store the private key.

The Keypair should be created as shown below.

Step 4: Start PuttyGen and click on Load.

Step 5: Point to the private key which has been downloaded earlier. If the file is not visible then remove the filter and select "All files (*.*)". Click on Open and click on OK.

Step 6: Click on "Save public key" and specify the same file name but with a pub extension as shown below.

Step 7: Go to the EC2 Management Console for some other region and navigate to the Keypair tab. Click on Actions and then "Import key pair".

Step 8: Click on "Choose file" and point to the pub file which was created earlier. Finally click on Import to create the Keypair.

Conclusion

Now we have created a Keypair in two regions. And both the regions have keypairs which have the same public/private key. So, we would be able to use the same Putty session when connecting to the EC2 instances in different regions. It's not a life saving hack, but it something interesting to know and saves a few seconds/clicks here and there.

Note that this approach is not recommended for production and sensitive setup as we are using the same Keypair across regions, but can definitely used when we are trying to learn AWS.