I am new to AWS and not a networking expert but curious to know more about it. I created a VPC with a public subnet only. Then i created an EC2 instance using an Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit pv AMI image (ami-e84d8480) as well generating the key pair needed to connect to it through ssh. I followed amazon's instructions to connect to an EC2 instance via ssh which did not work. Here is my attempted input and debug log: Running on OS X 10.9.4 user$ ssh -vvv -i key.pem [email protected] OpenSSH_6.2p2, OSSLShim 0.9.8r 8 Dec 2011 debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh_config debug1: /etc/ssh_config line 20: Applying options for * debug1: /etc/ssh_config line 102: Applying options for * debug2: ssh_connect: needpriv 0 debug1: Connecting to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] port 22. debug1: connect to address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx port 22: Operation timed out ssh: connect to host xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx port 22: Operation timed out To attempt to resolve the issue: I enabled the SSH port. Tried different usernames other than ubuntu, like ec2-user and root. Initially set an inbound ssh rule in the security group to connect to only my ip address. When that did not work, i changed it to allow any ip to connect. But those actions did not fix the problem. Here are my guesses as to what i am missing in getting the EC2 instance connection to work. My etc/ssh_config file may be preventing the connection from taking place. I may have missed an important networking detail when setting up the VPC. I do not have a public ip address specified for the instance. I am connecting through the private ip address. My questions for the community: Am i going about it the wrong way connecting to the instance through the private ip address? if so, do i need to specify a public ip address for it to connect or some other method?