'Operation timed out' error on trying to ssh in to the Amazon EMR Spark Cluster

"Operation timed out" Happens typically for one of two reasons:

• The IP you're ssh'ing from is not allowed by the EMR cluster's security group. Check this by going to the cluster's console / dashboard and find security group, click it, then edit "inbound rules" and add a line for SSH and in the IP field, dropdown and select your IP.

• or, if you've created the EMR cluster in a custom VPC and the cluster itself is launched into a private subnet, you'll not be able to directly SSH into it, without first SSH'ing into an instance in a public subnet in that same VPC, then SSH'ing to the cluster's driver node from there. This is a less likely issue if you don't have custom VPCs on your AWS account.

Adding steps to update ssh rule. The security group is in EC2 dashboard.

1) Navigate to EC2 dashboard -> security group

2) Find group ElasticMapReduce-master -> Inbound -> Edit -> Add rule

3) Add ssh, for source choose My IP

Now you should be able to ssh to the master node.