At this point you should know how to launch a new EC2 instance. The steps involved with creating and connecting to a Windows Server instance are similar, but the key creation and use is different. Read Carefully.

Select ‘Windows’ under Launch Instance and you’ll see that a Windows Server 2019 instance is available.

We are going to create a new key pair, but we will need to choose the ‘PEM’ format this time. (Save it to a folder where you can find it.)

Launch the Instance and give it a minute or two to spin up.

In the EC2 dashboard, you’ll see that port 3389 is open by default in the security group for your Windows machine.

You’ll want to wait for the ‘Status Check’ section to show that 2/2 Checks have passed before moving to the next step.

It will take a few minutes, but you’ll want to select ‘Get Windows Password’ as seen below. (Right click on the Windows Instance)

• Note: This will take a few minutes before you have the option to decrypt the RDP password. We will eventually decrypt the Administrator password for this machine using the .pem file we downloaded at machine creation time.

Upload the .pem file you downloaded when you create the machine.

You’ll be given the Administrator password for the machine. Copy it and save it somewhere you can find it later. (Bad idea to save a plaintext password on your host machine, but for now we’ll do it this way to make it easy.)

Open up the Remote Desktop Client on your Windows machine and connect to the IP Address of your EC2 instance.