How to Connect to an EC2 Instance with SSM

1. Launch an EC2 instance. (Preferably with an AMI using Amazon Linux 2023 or later)

2. Create an IAM role, and attach the policy "AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore"

3. Attach the role to your EC2 instance

4. Go to your instance, click "connect" and choose "Session Manager"

The benefits of connecting to your EC2 instance through Session Manager is that doesn't require you to open any ports to connect. This reduces the attack surface of your systems providing more security to your network.

Tip: After you created your EC2 instance, you can check if it has the SSM agent installed by connecting with Direct Connect first and then running the command

sudo systemctl status amazon-ssm-agent

You should get an output like this