There are several ways to connect to a virtual server running on AWS, the most common way is to connect to it using SSH. The Amazon EC2 Console provides a Java SSH Client, called MindTerm, that you can use to connect to the virtual server directly from the console. This is the easiest way to connect to the virtual server, but requires that you access the Amazon EC2 console using a browser with Java enabled.

If, instead of using MindTerm, you'd prefer to connect to your EC2 instance using a command-line SSH client or tool such as PuTTy, see Connect to Your Instance in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

To connect to a virtual server from the Amazon EC2 Console

• In the Amazon EC2 console, select your virtual server, and click Connect.
• Click A Java SSH client directly from my browser (Java required) .This feature requires that you have Java enabled in your browser.
  • In Private key path, enter the location on your local machine where you saved your key pair This is the PEM file you downloaded in the previous procedure.
  • Click Launch SSH Client.

• If your browser raises a security warning, confirm the connection.
• The first time you connect to your virtual server, MindTerm will ask you whether you want to add the virtual server to your list of known hosts. In the MindTerm - Confirmation dialog, click Yes.

• When you are connected, the MindTerm dialog will show connection information such as the following.
• Type pwd to print the name of the current directory on the virtual server and confirm your connection.

You are now connected to the server and can use standard Linux commands such as wget, scp, and yum install to download and install software to the virtual server.