Issues trying to SSH into a fresh EC2 instance with Paramiko

Why not use boto.manage.cmdshell instead?

cmd = boto.manage.cmdshell.sshclient_from_instance(instance,
                                                   key_path,
                                                   user_name='ec2_user')

(code taken from line 152 in ec2_launch_instance.py)

For available cmdshell commands have a look at the SSHClient class from cmdshell.py.

I seem to have figured this out by trial and error. Even though the instance status is "running" according to boto, there is a delay for when it will actually allow an SSH connection. Adding a "time.sleep(30)" before the "ssh.connect(...)" seems to do the trick for me, though this may vary.

The way to check it's ssh available is to make sure its two status checks both passes. On web UI it looks like this:

And using boto3 (the original question used boto but it was 5 years ago), we can do:

session = boto3.Session(...)
client = session.client('ec2')
res = client.run_instances(...) # launch instance
instance_id = res['Instances'][0]['InstanceId']

while True:
    statuses = client.describe_instance_status(InstanceIds=[instance_id])
    status = statuses['InstanceStatuses'][0]
    if status['InstanceStatus']['Status'] == 'ok' \
            and status['SystemStatus']['Status'] == 'ok':
        break
    print '.'
    time.sleep(5)
print "Instance is running, you are ready to ssh to it"