When accessing EC2 amazon cloud, you would receive a .pem file to login to the shell. Putty does not use .pem file and you would need to convert that file to .ppk file which putty uses. In order to convert it, you would need to download puttygen.exe from the website. Run the program and follow the following steps:
- Click “Conversions” on the menu and select “Import key”
- Browse to the .pem file
- Click “Save private key” button
- You would get a warning that you are saving the key without a passphrase. Please ignore it and click “Yes”
- Save the .ppk file
On putty:
- Select the session you created and click “Load”
- Open “SSH->Auth” from the tree on the left
- Under “Private key file for authentication” browse to the recently created .ppk file
- Save the session and you are ready