One of Eucalyptus’s oldest feature requests that people constantly ask about is the ability to import a pre-existing SSH key for use with instances. It even predates EC2’s support for doing that. I am happy to report that Eucalyptus 3.2 will at long last support it as well! (See the change on GitHub.) If you’re following Eucalyptus development, you can try this out right away with euca-import-keypair. Chances are, your version of euca2ools already contains it.

The thing that makes this feature really nice, however, looks like this:

Just a few hours ago, the new web console that is slated to land alongside Eucalyptus 3.2 later this year gained support for importing key pairs as well. (See the change on GitHub.) I’m sure I am not alone in wanting to thank the contributors who added this.