Connect to an AWS EMR Master Node with PuTTY: A Visual Guide

Because AWS documentation is out-of-date, wrong, verbose yet not specific enough or requires you to read 5–10 different link trees of pages of documentation.

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1. Download the latest Stable installation of PuTTY (e.g. putty-64bit-0.74-installer.msi). The installation should also install needed utilities like puttygen and pageant.

2. Create an EMR instance (guide here) and download a new .pem. A key-pair consists of a public key that AWS stores and a private key file that you store, i.e. a PEM file (aside: PEM stands for Privacy Enhanced Mail). Together, the two keys enable you to securely connect to your EC2 instance using SSH.

3. Convert your .pem file to a .ppk (PuTTY Private Key) file using the PuTTYgen app. PuTTY does not natively support the ppk format that AWS uses, so you need to first convert your PEM file to a PPK file

private key format for SSH keys. PuTTY provides a tool named PuTTYgen, which converts keys to the required format for PuTTY.

4. On the PuTTYgen dialog box, click the Load Button and then select the .pem file that you downloaded from AWS. Note: when browsing for your pem file be sure to select All Files in the dropdown list located to the right of the File name field. PuTTYgen will then load and convert your file.