Now Control SSH Key Management through AWS IAM or GitHub

Today, Media Temple is pleased to announce that we’ve made Secure Shell (SSH) key management more friendly and flexible for our Managed Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers, by offering the choice of managing your team’s SSH keys in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) or through GitHub.

The SSH Keys feature is simple—it allows developers to store their public SSH keys in IAM and their servers to fetch the public keys at every login, which means controlling access is now a one-step task. The HTTPS GitHub credentials feature is also fantastic—it allows our customers to bring in developers who already have GitHub SSH keys set up and to use those keys rather than yet another place to keep track of a public key. It’s a small workflow hurdle, but an important one when time is of the essence.

SSH enables two remotely connected users to perform network communication and other services on top of an unsecured network. Previously, Media Temple was managing SSH keys directly on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) nodes in the authorized_keys file. The system worked well, but it didn’t integrate neatly into the AWS ecosystem, and it didn’t allow for self-managed keys. That’s when we looked to the AWS Identity and Access Management service. IAM has two credentialing features we really like: SSH keys and HTTPS Git credentials for AWS CodeCommit. These were designed around AWS’s source control service but we’ve integrated them into our tooling to manage SSH access to our customers’ EC2 instances.

This new change also opens up all sorts of future planning on our roadmap, including the ability to generate ephemeral user sessions with temporary key pairs. Stay tuned for that as we continue to iterate on our Managed AWS offering from Media Temple.

To get set up with this new functionality, please raise a ticket to our support team or contact your CSM directly and we’ll walk you through the process.