Here's a quick tip for managing AWS keys a little differently—

All the tutorials you'll find refer to downloading the generated private key from the AWS console. This is fine for the first 10 times you create instances or cloud setups, but the time will come when you want to use the same key for lots of instances or you want to use your own keys all the time.

AWS has an "import keypair" method than can be reached easily using the AWS CLI tools. This command takes a public key and uploads it to your AWS account so that instances can be launched with it.

If you haven't already installed the AWS CLI tools, grab them from the Amazon EC2 API Tools website and put them in /usr/local/ec2-api-tools/. Add the environment variables:

export EC2_HOME=/path/to/ec2-tools/
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=`ls -C $EC2_HOME/pk-*.pem`
export EC2_CERT=`ls -C $EC2_HOME/cert-*.pem`

With this installed, you have access to loads of the API that isn't always exposed via GUIs – a nice chance to get under the hood.

Start by generating an ssh key-pair in the usual way:

ssh-keygen

And follow the instructions. This generates two files: the public key, id_rsa, and the private key, id_rsa.pub.

It's the public key that you need to upload, using the ec2-import-keypair command:

ec2-import-keypair dan-key --public-key-file ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Using the ec2-describe-keypairs command, you can see the newly uploaded keypair:

ec2-describe-keypairs
  KEYPAIR dan-key
fc:39:b2:60:90:4c:0f:66:fc:b8:a6:54:af:19:0c:ef
  KEYPAIR my-key
a6:54:af:19:0c:ef:fc:39:0f:66:fc:b8:b2:60:90:4c
  KEYPAIR your-key
fc:39:b2:60:90:4c:af:19:0c:ef:0f:66:fc:b8:a6:54

Instances can now be launched using the key by firing off the ec2-run-instances command:

ec2-run-instances ami-abc123ab -k dan-key

Finally, if you want to generate keys on the fly, the CLI tools can help you do this with the ec2-add-keypair command. This works in reverse to the ec2-import-keypair command by generating the key on AWS and passing the private key back to you:

ec2-add-keypair my-new-key
  KEYPAIR dangen1
aa:ce:ec:ae:bb:18:f3:cb:cc:ee:95:c3:fe:86:5b:09:f9:ae:18:ff
  -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

+PgLSIcy+rHHELXhv6bvZGamd2R2u2DFhBo36w9DEjAhocW2hraXMIIEowIBAAKCAQEAhXo2cUYv

B8/P/BP0ges6i7VJ9Oj1bDHfILtu805syqwN5J6IBcgvesthq4Xpj4zuIVsCctU5SEIkx9texM+b
....

fuy3QFJdl3rM0w/ry1QDRy5WgfZsIpAQZUuCaZgZx2BavviuVcFGrd67RfP6gt2yBk7EhN0gQCN2

X5YHEueK7qLqQYNsX4X9JROKgB0zMdaJvmCqekvoGhQepx5C4TqrDWIOHAwHOw6V6nqZ
----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

So, when would you import a key rather than generate one? If you have limited permissions on your local machine or if you want to create instances from a known set of keys, uploading the key makes more sense.

If you have a strong internal security policy and need to keep keys in rotation, uploading the public keys will be better than having any number of keys generated on AWS.

You can find out more about this command at the AWS CLI docs: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/CommandLineReference/index.html?ApiReference-cmd-ImportKeyPair.html