Thanks for the link - I wasn't aware of that feature in boto. I think I still would have chosen to shell out to ssh as it gives me more control over SSH options

Thanks for the link - I wasn't aware of that feature in boto. I think I still would have chosen to shell out to ssh as it gives me more control over SSH options (key forwarding etc.), although I see that boto is using paramiko under the hood so perhaps it would still be possible to get key forwarding and other features. Being able to go from an EC2 Instance object directly to an SSH session in pure Python will definitely come in handy in future. > Edit: Wow, a lot of you have built or found ssh-to-ec2 clients. Indeed, it seems to be a popular itch to scratch. At some point AWS will probably integrate something like this in awscli, thus rendering all of these 'ssh to ec2' scripts pointless :-)