How to access an Amazon EC2 linux virtual machine on Chromebook

What is a Crosh Window?

Crosh is a shell environment which can be installed on Chrome OS. Pressing Alt + Ctrl + T will start the shell.

What is Amazon EC2?

“Amazon EC2” in Wikipedia: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a central part of Amazon.com’s cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS). EC2 allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications.

Once the setup of the linux instance in Amazon EC2 is done, it can be accessed using the Crosh client. During the setup process of the linux instance, a private key(pem file) is provided to the user. Let’s say it is named amazon.pem and it is downloaded on the Chromebook.

The Setup

Start the Crosh shell and type ssh.

crosh> ssh

Now you need to specify your user, host and key:

ssh> user ec2-user
ssh> host xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
ssh> key amazon.pem

When you are ready entering them you need to execute the connect command:

ssh> connect

Happy coding on the Amazon virtual instances and managing them using your Chromebook machine.