Key Pair for Secure Access to EC2-based Jupyter Notebooks

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

To grant secure access to EC2-based Jupyter Notebooks, you need to create a secure key pair. A key pair consists of a private key that you keep secure and a public key that you attach to the EC2 instances. AWS uses the public key to encrypt data, such as the administrator password or access credentials, and you use your private key to decrypt that information.

To create a key pair with Pulumi, you will be using the `aws.ec2.KeyPair` resource, which is part of the Pulumi AWS package. This resource allows you to create a new key pair and returns the private key, which you can then use to access the instances.

Here's a Pulumi program in Python that defines an AWS EC2 key pair, which is a basic requirement for setting up secure SSH access to your EC2-based Jupyter Notebook servers:

```python
import pulumi
import pulumi_aws as aws

# Create a new key pair for SSH access to the EC2 instances.
key_pair = aws.ec2.KeyPair("my-key-pair",
    key_name="my-key-pair",
    # For actual use, replace the public key string with your own public key content, in SSH RSA format.
    public_key="ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAACAQDw..."  
)

# After creating the key pair, we can export the key pair's name and the public key,
# which you'll use when creating an EC2 instance that can run Jupyter Notebook.
pulumi.export('key_pair_name', key_pair.key_name)
pulumi.export('public_key', key_pair.public_key)

```

### What does this program do?

1. It imports the necessary pulumi and AWS-specific modules so you can work with AWS resources.
2. It creates a new `KeyPair` resource named "my-key-pair". You should place your own public key material in the `public_key` parameter, which gets associated with the key pair in AWS. This public key will be pre-installed on EC2 instances launched with this key pair.
3. It exports two outputs: `key_pair_name` which is the name of the newly-created key pair, and `public_key`, which is the material of the public key attached to the key pair.

### What to do next?

After running this Pulumi program, you'll have a new key pair in AWS. When you're launching EC2 instances to run your Jupyter Notebooks, make sure to specify this key pair's name so that the public key gets installed. You'll then use the corresponding private key to establish a secure SSH session with the EC2 instances.

Keep your private key in a secure location. It’s needed to access the EC2 instances via SSH.

### Important note:

The public key provided in the code above is there as a placeholder. In practice, you must replace it with your own public key material for your key pair to be functional and secure.

Ensure you use this key pair responsibly, as anyone with access to your private key could gain access to any instance launched with this key pair.