Why does Cloudbreak create unique key pairs for every cluster in AWS?

[#1]

I would like to better understand the need to have both a local SSH key on the Cloudbreak instance and an AWS key pair for every cluster that Cloudbreak spins up.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

1,

You don't need an SSH key pair on the Cloudbreak instance. You need to provide a public SSH key when you create a credential then you can use the private key for SSHing to the instances that Cloudbreak will launch. That SSH key can be anywhere.

2,

Cloudbreak creates a new key pair for every cluster and generates a unique name for it to avoid name collision if many user use the same AWS account.

[#3]

Thanks, @khorvath. That's helpful.

Is there any way to obtain the AWS key pairs that are generated for each cluster?

[#4]

Each key pair is generated from the public SSH key you provided and a unique name as you can see it here:

https://github.com/sequenceiq/cloudbreak/blob/master/cloud-aws/src/main/java/com/sequenceiq/cloudbre...

so basically you have the public and private key as well.