On the next screen, select EC2 as the service and click on the Next: Permissions button. Click on the Roles menu in the left and then click on the Create role button. Let’s create an IAM Role which is used by the EC2 instance to work with the Session Manager.

In the next step, you create role which is used by the EC2 instance so that Session Manager can work with the EC2 instance. Either download the Download.csv file or make note of the Access key ID and Secret access key as you need it later when configuring AWS Profile for the AWS CLI. On the next screen, click on the Next: Review button.įinally on the Review screen, click on the Create user button. Select AdministrativeAccess policy and click on the Next: Tags button. On the next screen, select Attach existing policies directly option. On the next screen, type in dojouser as the user name and select Programmatic access option. Click on the Users menu in the left and then click on the Add user button. Login to the AWS Console and change the region to Ireland. The first step is to create an IAM user whose credentials are used to run the AWS CLI commands for the session manager. Session Manager Plugin (Download and install from link)

Your local machine or laptop which you are using for this exercise should have the following configuration and software installed-ĪWS CLI 2.0 (Download and install from link) If you don’t have an AWS account, kindly use the link to create free trial account for AWS. You need to have an AWS account with administrative access to complete the exercise. Still - you will be able to connect to the Windows Server over RDP using the Session Manager.

For this access, you will not configure security group for RDP access and you will also not configure key-pair for the Windows EC2 instance. In this exercise, you use session manager to create secure RDP session with a Windows server. Session Manager provides secure and auditable instance management without the need to open inbound ports, maintain bastion hosts, or manage SSH keys. Session Manager is a AWS Systems Manager capability that allows to manage EC2 instances, on-premises instances, and virtual machines (VMs) through an interactive one-click browser-based shell or through the AWS CLI. Using Amazon Session Manager for Secure RDP Access It is recommended to clean-up the resources as soon as you finish the exercise to minimize the cost.

Important Note: You will create AWS resources during the exercise which will incur cost in your AWS account.

Rdp session manager