I couldn’t find any instructions online on how to launch an AWS EC2 instance from an iPad or iPhone.

The problem is generating an RSA key from an iPad. The AWS web interface doesn’t lend it’s self to allowing iOS devices to download the private RSA key.

It turns out you can generate an RSA key pair with the free Serverauditor SSH client for iOS. Heres how…

Open up the Serverauditor app on your iPhone / iPad and select ‘Keychain’ from the left hand menu.

Click the ‘+’ symbol.

Select ‘New Key’.

Give the new key a name and select ‘Save’.

Now click ‘Edit’ at the top right.

Select the key you just created, this time click ‘Edit’ at the top left.

Select the ‘Public’ tab for the public key. Then select ‘Copy’.

Now log into your AWS EC2 console and select ‘Key Pairs’ from the left hand menu.

Select ‘Import Key Pair’.

Enter a key pair name and paste in the public key you copied out of Serverauditor. Select ‘Import’.

You can see the new public key has been imported. Select ‘Instances’ from the left hand menu.

Select ‘Launch Instance’.

Select the image that you’d like to use for the new instance. I selected a 64-bit Ubuntu image.

Select an instance type. I selected the ‘Free tier eligible’ ‘t2.micro’ instance type. Then select ‘Review and Launch’.

Scroll down to ‘Securty Groups’ and ensure that inbound SSH is allowed. If not you’ll need to select ‘Edit security groups’ and add an entry to allow inbound SSH connections.

Select ‘Launch’.

From the first drop downs select ‘Choose an existing key pair’ and then from the second drop down, select the key we imported earlier. Tick the checkbox to indicate that understand you’ll lock yourself out of the newly created instance if this goes wrong. Select ‘Launch Instances’.

From the next screen select ‘View Instances’.

At the bottom of the instances page, select the ‘Description’ tab. Copy the ‘Public IP’ value.

Open up Serverauditor, select ‘Quick Connect’ from the left hand menu. Enter the IP address you just copied into the ‘Host’ field. Enter the default username for the instance image you selected. I used Ubuntu, the default username for this image is ‘ubuntu’. Select the key icon.

Select the key you created in the app earlier.

Select ‘Connect’.

Select ‘Continue’.

And there you are…